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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying escape feat after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for most of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team fan these days – for her or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for individuals personally affected by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first major league franchise to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. Several players such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international stars, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's present proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a simple task, {