For Natalia Molina, longtime fan Los Angeles Dodgers and a third-generation Mexican-American baseball crownball. World Series didn't happen in last Saturday's hotly contested finale, when her team made one deadly escape after another before pulling out an extra-innings win over the Toronto Blue Jays.
It came a game early when the team's two second-tier players, Quique Hernandez of Puerto Rico and Miguel Rojas of Venezuela, put together a thrilling, winning run that simultaneously upended many of the negative stereotypes Donald Trump has touted about Latinos since he first ran for president a decade ago.
The game itself was exciting, with Hernandez rushing from left field to catch a ball that he initially lost in the stadium lights, then sending it to second base to chalk up another game-winning run in the same game. Rojas, who was on second base, received the ball just a split second before a Blue Jays runner slammed into him, sending him flying backwards.
More than just a great sports moment, it was perhaps a decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking like the weaker team for much of the series. For Molina, it was inspiring, politically and culturally, a much-needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angelesafter months of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets and a constant stream of negativity from the White House.
“Kike and Miggy put forward this counterargument,” said Molina, a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “The world saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders in a team, having a completely different type of masculinity. They strutting, they scream, they take their shirts off.
“It was such a juxtaposition to what we see in the news – ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids, Latinos were thrown to the ground and chased. It's so easy to be demoralized now.”
Not that being a Dodgers fan is easy these days, for Molina or the legions of other Latinos who faithfully attend home games and fill half the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.
When the Trump administration began conducting aggressive immigration raids in Los Angeles in early June and sent National Guard troops and Marines to the city to respond to the ensuing protests, the city's two football teams were quickly put out statements solidarity with immigrant families, but not with the Dodgers.
Team president Stan Kasten has said the Dodgers want to stay out of politics, a view perhaps colored by the fact that a significant minority of fans, including Latinos, are Trump supporters. (Under intense public pressure, the team later pledged $1 million to support families directly affected by the raids, but did not publicly criticize the Trump administration.)
Three months earlier, the team had unhesitatingly accepted Trump's invitation to celebrate their 2024 World Series victory at the White House, a move that Los Angeles Times sportswriter Dylan Hernandez described as “pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical” given the Dodgers' pride in being the first major league team to break the color barrier in the 1940s, and frequent appeals about this heritage and the values it embodies, by leaders and current and former players. Several team members, including manager Dave Roberts, expressed reluctance to go to the White House during Trump's first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.
Another complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by corporate giant Guggenheim Partners, whose holdings, according to media reports and published balance sheets, include a stake in GEO Group, a private prison corporation that operates ICE detention centers. Guggenheim leadership has said many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say that silence—and the GEO investment—is their own form of acquiescence to Trump's agenda.
It's all causing mixed feelings, particularly among Latino fans – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series victory and the subsequent outburst of Dodgers pride throughout Los Angeles.
“Can I root for the Dodgers?” local columnist Eric Galindo experienced the start of the playoffs in elegant essay reflecting that “Dodger blue is in our veins, but doubt is in our hearts.” Galindo ultimately couldn't bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply to the point where he decided that his one-man boycott must have brought the team the luck it needed to win.
Many fans who share Galindo's concerns seem to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its roster of international players, including Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while ridiculing the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was that more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the crowd roared its approval for Roberts and his players but booed Kasten and Mark Walter, chief executive of Guggenheim Partners.
“These men in suits can’t take our boys in blue away from us,” Molina said. “We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have.”
The problem, however, runs deeper than just the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. In the song from Ry Cooder's 2005 album Chavez Ravine that tells the story, an impoverished stadium valet reveals that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.
Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the most popular Mexican-American columnist and television personality in southern California, sees a dark side to the long and dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fans. He calls the Dodgers Flamin' Hot Cheetos baseball, “a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy, following from too many Latinos” that has defrauded its fans for decades.
“They hugged Latino fans for so long and picked their pockets for so long because they got away with it,” Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its lack of response to ICE raids were undermined by the dismal turnout at home games. didn't dipeven at the height of the protests, when downtown Los Angeles was under a nightly curfew.
Separating the team from its corporate owners is no easy task, not least because it was Guggenheim who spent more than a billion dollars last year to bring Ohtani and dominant World Series pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto to Los Angeles. Guggenheim was at the forefront of the internationalization of sports in general, finding so many business opportunities through rights and merchandising that, according to some reportsthe company has already recouped the staggering $700 million investment it made in Ohtani alone.
Indeed, there was talk in baseball, even before Los Angeles won its second World Series in a row, that the Dodgers were ruining the sport with their financial muscle, snapping up so many star players that it was unfair to everyone else. However, perhaps the greatest gift of the brilliant, exciting series with the Blue Jays was how vulnerable the Dodgers looked and how hard they had to claw and claw to escape in both final, must-win games.
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, is not alone in seeing parallels with the city's exceptionally difficult year, which began with devastating January wildfires that destroyed entire neighborhoods and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. “The city was on pins and needles,” she said. said New York Times. “Given the past year, we can use this surge of adrenaline, this surge of goodwill.”
Meanwhile, the players themselves clearly see the connection between their performance on the field and society as a whole, and the feeling is mutual. Hernandez, a Puerto Rican left fielder who plays several other positions, has endeared himself to many fans by creating his own statement condemning ICE raids over the summer. “Maybe I don't [an Angeleno] born and raised,” he wrote, “but… I cannot see our community being abused, profiled, insulted and torn apart.”
Rocky Sasaki, the youngest of the team's Japanese superstars, captured the hearts of Latin American fans from the moment he chose the catchy Spanish-language dance number Báilalo Rocky as his pre-pitch music. (He explained that Roxas suggested the song to him.)
All of this forms the basis of the conversations Latino fans have with each other before, during and after games. Many say they won't soon stop loving the team known in Spanish as “Dwyersbecause they will no longer love the mothers and fathers who first brought them to the games and gave them a taste for baseball.
“What do you do when you feel something and it’s difficult?” – asked Molina. “For many Latinos, the Dodgers are how they connect to American identity. It is the most American organization that most immigrants in Los Angeles feel connected to.”
