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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up regularly to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in support for families directly affected by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a move that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and past players. Several players including the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention corporation that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the team the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who share similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its roster of international stars, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Impact

The problem, however, goes further than just the team's present owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill above the city center and then selling the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {