For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying escape act after another and then winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.
It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in recent years.
The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.
This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the key shift in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for most of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.
"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."
"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."
However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.
After aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.
The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. Under considerable external demands, the organization later committed $one million in support for families personally affected by the raids but issued no public condemnation of the administration.
Months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's boast in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by executives and present and past athletes. Several team members such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.
An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.
All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across the city.
"Can one to support the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.
Numerous fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.
"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."
The problem, though, runs deeper than just the organization's present proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.
Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.
"They have acted around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening restriction.
Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {
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