Fernandomania a transformative time in L.A. and in baseball
It really has been 40 years since Fernando Valenzuela took the baseball world by storm. (Or, if you are a Dodger fan with a long memory and a tendency to secondguess, 40 years and six months since Fernando should have made his first big-league start but didn’t, in the unsuccessful one-game playoff against Houston at the end of the 1980 season.)
A year ago Friday,
Valenzuela was called on as an emergency starter when Jerry Reuss and Burt Hooton were unavailable. He pitched a complete-game, five-hit shutout of the Astros, and proceeded to demonstrate it wasn’t a fluke: Complete-game victories in his first eight decisions, shutouts in five of them, and a charisma
that had everyone in the L.A. area — darned near everyone in the game, in fact — enthralled.
A pudgy left-hander, his eyes would search the sky in the midst of his windup before he delivered a devastating screwball that made hitters look foolish. And he would do so with a preternatural calm belying his age (and there were many in baseball who swore they wouldn’t believe he was only 20 until they saw his birth certificate).
When the 1981 season started, the Dodgers’ Spanish-language radio “network” consisted of one station in Los Angeles. Within weeks, thanks to Fernando, the broadcasts were being heard on 31 stations, most of them in Mexico.
Sports Illustrated magazine did three Valenzuela stories and a cover piece in a six-week period. Other journalists were interviewing Carl Hubbell, the great screwballer of the 1930s. Still others were traveling to Fernando’s hometown of Etchohuaquila, located between Ciudad Obregonin the Mexican state of Sonora, with a population that as recently as 2010 was 738 according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática, Mexico.
So yes, he was a phenomenon. Yes, he played a huge role in the Dodgers’ 1981 championship; his 149-pitch complete-game victory over the Yankees in Game 3 of the World Series, after the Dodgers had returned to L.A. down 2-0, was the first of four straight wins that led to a parade.
It even allowed Dodger fans to forget the previous Oct. 6. Valenzuela, called up from Double-A that September, pitched 17 2/3 innings over 10 relief appearances without giving up an earned run. But Manager Tommy Lasorda chose Dave Goltz to start the Monday afternoon playoff after the Dodgers had swept a threegame series to tie the Astros for the division title. Goltz was roughed up, the Dodgers lost 7-1, and Lasorda had to live with that second-guess until Tom Niedenfuer-vs.-Jack Clark in the 1985 NL Championship Series surpassed it on the “how could you?” scale.
Fernando won Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards in 1981 and maintained a high level for most of the decade, even while averaging 255 innings a year through 1987. Ultimately, his left shoulder gave out from overuse.
But Fernando’s impact off the field lives to this day.
For the first 23 seasons, the Dodgers were in Los Angeles, many in this region’s Mexican-American community gave them the cold shoulder. There was, and in some quarters remains, a grudge over the way the once-thriving Latino community in Chavez Ravine was cleared out to make room for, originally, a mammoth public housing project in the early 1950s, and ultimately for the ballpark that now occupies that space.
Nuance is often lost, of course. The eviction notices were first sent out in 1950, according to Eric Nusbaum’s 2020 book, Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers and the Lives Caught in Between. But the sight that would stick in the minds of people for years to come was the televised image of members of the Aréchiga family, among the last holdouts, being physically removed from their homes by police in the spring of 1958.
The factions that opposed the ballpark used those images, and it’s easy to forget now, but the ballpark proposition on the June 1958 primary ballot was no sure thing. An election-eve telethon on Channel 11 turned the vote in favor of the stadium, and a lawsuit against the project was rejected by the California Supreme Court in January 1959.
But those images stuck with people for decades, during which many in the Latino community were lukewarm at best toward the Dodgers. It took a charismatic young pitcher to change that and give those people and their children a hero and someone to emulate. Loyalties formed then have lasted well beyond Fernando’s career.
“When I started with the Dodgers in 1959 at the Coliseum, the Latinos coming to the ballgames were about 8 percent,” Jaime Jarrín, the Dodgers’ Spanish language broadcaster, told me in a 2018 interview. “Now, at Dodger Stadium, they tell me it’s around 46 percent Latinos. And if you go during a game and take a walk around the ballpark, you will hear as much Spanish as English.”
Jarrín, who now has Valenzuela as one of his broadcast partners, was an integral part of Fernandomania. Valenzuela spoke no English in interviews then, though he was doing English interviews by 1983. But at the start, Jarrín was his interpreter for not only postgame interviews but for the off-day news conferences that became routine in every city the Dodgers visited.
Jarrín described him in those days as “dedicated to the game and a very introverted, very private person.” But Fernando could be a prankster with a straight face in the clubhouse, tapping someone on the opposite shoulder as he passed to make them look the wrong way, or twirling a lasso and then roping an unsuspecting teammate.
And how do we know of Valenzuela’s actual grasp of English that first year? During that 149-pitch performance in the World Series, Lasorda came out to talk to Valenzuela after
Rick Cerone had hit a tworun home run in the fourth to cut the Dodgers’ lead to 4-3. Lasorda said, in Spanish, “If you don’t give up another run, we’re going to win this ballgame.”
Replied Valenzuela, in English: “Are you sure?”
There was also this: The Dodgers drew a little more than 7,500 additional customers on average when Fernando pitched in 1981, 48,363 in his 12 starts compared to 40,896 in the 44 games he didn’t pitch. It was even more lopsided after the 50-day players strike at midseason: 46,528 in Fernando’s seven poststrike starts, 37,455 for the other 24 games. No wonder he held out briefly the following spring.
“I told myself, ‘The time will come. Sooner or later we will have something,’ “Valenzuela recalled Saturday afternoon during a Zoom session. And by 1986 he was, indeed, baseball’s highest-paid pitcher.
Four decades ago, Fernando was about as sure a thing as you could get, on the field, at the box office and in the community. To this day, L.A. baseball is better for it.