“On behalf of the Dodger organization, we profoundly mourn the passing of Fernando,” Dodgers team president and chief executive Stan Kasten said in a statement. “He is one of the most influential Dodgers ever and belongs on the Mount Rushmore of franchise heroes.
He galvanized the fan base with the Fernandomania season of 1981 and has remained close to our hearts ever since, not only as a player but also as a broadcaster. He has left us all too soon. Our deepest condolences go out to his wife Linda and his family.”
Valenzuela’s relationship with the Dodgers included some difficult stretches, with the star contesting his release from the team and taking years to eventually accept an ambassador role with the franchise.
How did the man who remained guarded in the spotlight all his life forge such a close and enduring connection with Dodger fans?
“Fernando is the uncle who made good,” playwright Luis Alfaro said during The Los Angeles Times’ award-winning “Fernandomania at 40” series in 2021. “He is the relative who is forever a superstar. He’s immortalized, he’s the María Félix of sports.”
For Valenzuela, it was a bond that was cemented early in his rookie season.
During that heady 1981 season, Valenzuela used an assortment of pitches that included a screwball to become the first, and to this day only, player to win the National League Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards during the same season. With a windup in which he would look skyward almost as if he sought guidance from a higher power, he won his first eight starts — five by shutout — shocking longtime baseball observers.
“It is the most puzzling, wonderful, rewarding thing I think we’ve seen in baseball in many, many years,” Vin Scully exclaimed on the air after the fifth of those shutouts, a 1-0 win over the Mets in New York, adding: “And somehow this youngster from Mexico, with the pixie smile on his face, acts like he’s pitching batting practice.”
After a midseason players’ strike interrupted the regular season, the Dodgers would go on to win the World Series, beating the New York Yankees in six games. During the team’s postseason run, Valenzuela was the winning pitcher in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, holding the Montreal Expos to one run in 8 2/3 innings and helping the Dodgers secure the pennant.
He started Game 3 of the World Series, following two losses by the Dodgers in New York, and gutted out a complete-game, 5-4 victory despite throwing 147 pitches, giving up nine hits and walking seven. It was the first of four consecutive victories by the Dodgers to clinch their fifth championship in franchise history.
The Dodgers, longing for a Mexican star to connect with the Latino population in L.A., had finally found one in Valenzuela, whose impact would transform what had been predominantly a white fan base.
“When Mr. Walter O’Malley came to Los Angeles, he used to tell us, ‘Jaime, when are you going to find and give us a Mexican Sandy Koufax?’ And I used to tell Mr. O’Malley, ‘It’s impossible to find another Koufax, never mind Mexico but any Latin country,’ ” said Jaime Jarrín, the Dodgers’ longtime Spanish-language announcer who retired in 2022. “He realized it was very, very important to please the Mexican community in Southern California.”
1981 was a remarkable season, perhaps surpassed only by the events leading up to it.
The youngest of 12 children, Fernando Valenzuela was born in Etchohuaquila, a small farming village in the state of Sonora, Mexico, on Nov. 1, 1960. His parents, Avelino and Emergilda, and his six brothers and five sisters lived in a whitewashed adobe house with five rooms and no running water in a community that during Valenzuela’s youth consisted of a few dirt roads and had a population of 140.
In addition to helping tend to the family’s crops, Valenzuela and his brothers played baseball. Valenzuela stood out even at a young age and by 1977, he was signed by Etchohuaquila’s local team, the Navojoa Mayos.
“By that point, I told myself, ‘now it’s a career, it’s not for fun,’ ” Valenzuela told The Times in 2021.
Facing players much older than him, Valenzuela successfully pitched for several teams before moving on to the Yucatan Leones of the Mexican League in 1979 by the age of 18.
By this point, he was on the radar of Dodgers scout Mike Brito. Himself a distinct figure, with his Panama hat, mustached grin and ubiquitous cigar, Brito first spotted Valenzuela when he was pitching for Guanajuato in 1978. The Dodgers scout was on hand to see a shortstop on the other team, but Valenzuela quickly got his attention.
Brito continued to follow Valenzuela’s career and lobby the Dodgers to sign the left-hander. By July 1979, the Dodgers purchased Valenzuela’s contract from the Leones for $120,000 — considered a substantial amount at the time for a Mexican player. But it ultimately proved to be a groundbreaking transaction. Major league teams had largely ignored scouting in Mexico before then. Prior to Valenzuela’s Dodgers debut in 1980, fewer than 40 players born in Mexico had appeared in the majors, according to Baseball America. That number has since grown to nearly 150.
After spending the rest of the 1979 season with the Class High-A Lodi Dodgers, starting three games and posting a 1.12 earned-run average, the organization determined that Valenzuela needed to add another pitch to his arsenal to continue to move up. Brito suggested he learn a split-fingered fastball, but no one in the Dodgers system threw one.
Then Brito remembered Bobby Castillo, a former Lincoln High and L.A. Valley College star who had spent parts of three seasons with the Dodgers, threw a screwball. Despite language barriers — Castillo did not speak Spanish and Valenuela did not speak English — Castillo taught Valenzuela the screwball in the Arizona Instructional League.
Valenzuela caught on quickly.
“I’m not lying to you: Within a week, Fernando was throwing the screwball as good as Babo,” Brito told The Times in 2011, using Castillo’s nickname.
With an expanded arsenal, Valenzuela thrived with the Dodgers’ Double-A affiliate in San Antonio in 1980. The left-hander won 13 games and tossed 11 complete games while striking out a Texas League-best 162 batters in 174 innings.
Valenzuela was called up in September when rosters expanded and he appeared in his first game for the Dodgers on Sept. 15, 1980, when he pitched two innings in a 9-0 loss to the Braves in Atlanta. He allowed two unearned runs and recorded his first MLB strikeout, fanning Jerry Royster.
“The only Dodger performance worth noting was by pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, who made his major league debut,” The Times wrote after the game.
Thrust into a pennant race, Valenzuela appeared in 10 games and gave up no earned runs in 17 2/3 innings as the Dodgers forged a tie atop the NL West with the Houston Astros at the end of the regular season. Faced with a one-game playoff at Dodger Stadium, manager Tommy Lasorda elected to start Dave Goltz — a high-priced right-hander the team had signed before the season but who had performed poorly — over Valenzuela, then 19 years old, who had pitched two innings the day before.
Goltz lasted three innings, giving up four runs in a 7-1 loss as the Dodgers’ season came to an end. Valenzuela, for his part, pitched two scoreless innings and gave up one hit.
It was a hint of things to come, but once again, a confluence of events put Valenzuela in the spotlight.
Valenzuela was on the Dodgers roster coming out of spring training in 1981, firmly in the team’s starting pitching rotation behind left-hander Jerry Reuss and right-hander Burt Hooton. The day before the season opener against the Astros at Dodger Stadium, Reuss suffered a calf injury during a team workout. Hooton and other starting pitchers were not ready to step in, allowing Valenzuela to become the first rookie pitcher to start on opening day in Dodgers history.
“Tommy liked to make jokes, so I said ‘hahaha,’ ” Valenzuela said about being informed of the assignment. “And he said, ‘it’s not a joke, it’s serious.’ And that’s when I said, ‘yeah, why not?’ ”
Valenzuela scattered five hits, went nine innings and defeated the Astros, 2-0, to kick off a remarkable display of pitching that captured the imagination of baseball fans and quickly became a source of pride for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He went the distance again in his next start, a 7-1 victory over the Giants in San Francisco.
Then came three more shutouts — at San Diego, at Houston and at home against the Giants — before he pitched another complete game and beat the Expos, 6-1. Then another shutout at New York against the Mets to cap off an 8-0 start that featured a 0.50 ERA.
By this point, the buzz and attention surrounding the portly left-hander had reached a fever pitch, and the impact was as wide as it was sudden.
The Dodgers, who had broadcast games in Spanish since 1959, saw a ratings increase and interest in expanding their radio network into Mexico. Jarrín, the team’s lead play-by-play announcer, was thrust into the spotlight himself, serving as an interpreter for Valenzuela during news conferences before and after games.
“To the point that, in those years, the radio station ratings were usually 3.4,” Jarrín said in 2021. “We were happy with 3.4. But at KTNQ, we’d get a rating of 8.6. Never had a radio station done that before. It was because of Fernando, Fernandomania and the Dodgers.”
L.A.’s Mexican community began to flock to Dodger Stadium during his starts. The Dodgers, who had become the first franchise to draw 3 million fans in 1978, averaged 48,430 fans during Valenzuela’s home starts and 42,523 overall during the strike-interrupted 1981 season — the highest average attendance in Dodger Stadium history to that point.
“It was like an East L.A. backyard party,” boxing historian and author Gene Aguilera told The Times in 2021.“He was like a family member you would visit every four days at Dodger Stadium.”
The electric atmosphere was also surprising considering the fraught history at Chavez Ravine, when Latino families were uprooted from neighborhoods there throughout the 1950s to eventually clear the way for the construction of Dodger Stadium. L.A.’s Latino community never forgot that chapter in the city’s history, but Valenzuela’s meteoric rise and everyman appeal proved hard to resist.
“Fernando was really key for bringing the hearts and minds of la raza to the stadium,” Richard Montoya, a filmmaker and playwright who staged a show about the history of Chavez Ravine, told The Times in 2021.
Added Richard Santillán, a professor emeritus and longtime season-ticket holder: “People laughed, my father laughed. My father would say he looks just like a typical mexicano. He was pudgy … he was what they’d call gordito.”
Though a 50-day strike wiped out two months of the 1981 season, Valenzuela continued to achieve milestones through the rest of the year — the second rookie pitcher to start an All-Star Game, the first rookie to lead the NL in strikeouts, a World Series championship, a Cy Young Award, a Silver Slugger Award, to name a few.
Valenzuela remained a consistent top-line starting pitcher over the next four seasons, averaging nearly 16 wins. Before the 1983 season, Valenzuela also became the first player to win a $1 million salary in arbitration — with his representatives using Valenzuela’s vast drawing power as part of their argument.
The year 1986 proved to be fruitful on several fronts for Valenzuela. In February, the Dodgers signed the left-hander to a three-year contract worth $5.5 million, the largest for an MLB pitcher at the time. In July, he tied a record by striking out five consecutive batters in the All-Star Game — a mark set in 1934 by Carl Hubbell, himself a screwball pitcher.
Despite the Dodgers finishing 73-89, Valenzuela won 21 games to lead the NL and pitched 20 complete games to lead all of baseball — numbers unheard of in MLB today.
By this point, Valenzuela was firmly a cult hero among Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Latino artists wrote songs in his honor and painted murals of Valenzuela, and he was referenced in the 1987 comedic film “Born in East L.A.” He was mobbed whenever he made personal appearances in East Los Angeles at parks and schools.
Through his first six seasons, Valenzuela won 97 games, threw 84 complete games and posted a 2.97 ERA while never landing on the injured list. But despite being only 25 years old at the end of the 1986 season, he did not maintain that form for the rest of his career as injuries and wear and tear from overuse set in.
Valenzuela won 29 games during the next three seasons and was left off the postseason roster in 1988 as the Dodgers stormed to another World Series title.
In what turned out to be his final season with the Dodgers, Valenzuela provided fans one last thrill on June 29, 1990. Earlier in the day, Dave Stewart — Valenzuela’s former teammate on the 1981 championship team — threw a no-hitter for the Oakland Athletics in Toronto. Watching on television in the clubhouse before his start at Dodger Stadium, Valenzuela turned to some teammates and said, “That’s great, now maybe we’ll see another no-hitter.”
And Valenzuela delivered, beating the Cardinals, 6-0, to mark the first time in modern baseball history that two no-hitters were thrown on the same day. The final two outs came when he induced Pedro Guerrero, another former teammate on the 1981 team, to ground into a double play.
He finished the 1990 season 13-13 with a 4.59 ERA — his final win with the Dodgers coming on Sept. 14 at Cincinnati, a 155-pitch complete game. The end of his tenure with the Dodgers came bitterly and abruptly the following March, when the team released him on the eve of the 1991 season — on the day his $2.55 million contract would have become guaranteed.
Earlier in spring training, the Dodgers had played a pair of exhibition games in Monterrey, Mexico — providing the 30-year-old Valenzuela an opportunity to pitch in his home country for the first time in his MLB career. Even 10 years removed from the initial wave of Fernandomania, Valenzuela remained the star attraction.
“We knew Fernando’s importance to his country before we came down here, but to see it, to feel, to hear it … it was an extraordinary moment,” former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley said at the time.
Nevertheless, citing his ineffectiveness during spring training and his 23-26 record the previous two seasons, the Dodgers elected to move on, which upset and surprised Latino communities across the Southland.
“He gave them everything he had,” one fan, Raul Montesinos, told The Times. “It’s like a worker when he’s all used up and the boss gets rid of him because he’s of no use anymore.”
Valenzuela vowed to continue pitching, signing with the Angels in May 1991 but lasting only two starts before being released later that season. After a year pitching in the Mexican league, Valenzuela returned to the majors in 1993 and pitched for the Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals over the next five seasons. His best campaign was in 1996, when he won 13 games for a team that won the National League West division.
After being traded to the Cardinals in June 1997 and then released by them a month later, he never pitched in the majors again. Valenzuela was invited to spring training by the Dodgers in 1999, an offer he declined. Over 17 seasons in MLB, 11 with the Dodgers, Valenzuela won 173 games. (He ranks ninth on the Dodgers’ career wins list with 141.)
By 2003, the relationship between Valenzuela and the Dodgers thawed enough that he joined the team’s Spanish-language broadcast team, helping call games with Pepe Yñiguez and Jarrín, the man who’d been by his side during the heady days of Fernandomania.
It was an avenue that allowed Valenzuela to maintain a high — but guarded — profile, though he remained visible in other ways. He helped coach the Mexican national team in the World Baseball Classic four times between 2006 and 2017; he became a U.S. citizen in July 2015, going through the naturalization ceremony at the L.A. Convention Center, about three and a half miles from Dodger Stadium; he headed an ownership group that purchased the Quintana Roo Tigres, a Mexican League team located in Cancun, in 2017; and in 2019, the Mexican League retired his No. 34 jersey.
That number had never been worn by any Dodger since the team released him in 1991, an unofficial acknowledgment of his effect on the franchise. But the Dodgers steadfastly stood by their policy of retiring only the numbers of players who were already in the Baseball Hall of Fame (though Jim Gilliam’s number was retired in the wake of his death in October 1978).
And Valenzuela, despite his impressive run early in his career, did not garner enough support for enshrinement (75% of the vote from members of the Baseball Writers Association of America is needed). In his first year on the ballot in 2003, he netted 6.2% of the vote, surpassing the 5% threshold needed to stay on the ballot for another year. The number dropped to 3.8% in 2004 and he fell off the ballot in subsequent years.
But Valenzuela’s enduring legacy, with the Dodgers and its fans, and the sport as a whole, provided an opportunity to retire his number on Aug. 11, 2023, in a pregame ceremony at Dodger Stadium.
“It never crossed my mind that this would ever happen,” Valenzuela said before the ceremony. “Like being in the World Series my rookie year, I never thought that would happen. I didn’t think this would happen, because first of all you have to be in Cooperstown. It really caught me by surprise. It’s hard to put into words what this means
LOS ANGELES — His path from a small Mexican village to spectacular success in Major League Baseball changed the demographics of the Dodgers fan base and inspired generations of fans.
His unconventional pitching motion, unique body type, and enigmatic aura made a lasting impression on people from all walks of life, whether they were Mexican immigrants and their families, the Latino community in Los Angeles dealing with the uprooting caused by the Dodgers’ stadium construction, or artists motivated by his skill on the mound.
Fernando Valenzuela, a Dodgers great, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 63. His wife, Linda, four children, seven grandchildren, and other family members survive him.
Despite a long-standing tradition that the Dodgers only retired a player’s jersey number for those who were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Valenzuela’s influence lasted so long and so strongly that the team did so in 2023.
It was an appropriate conclusion to a public baseball career that had an extraordinary start, a startling and enthralling period in 1981 that would go down in history as “Fernandomania.”
As demonstrated by the overwhelming number of No. 34 Dodgers jerseys in the stands and the applause he would receive at home games when he was shown on the scoreboard while working games at Dodger Stadium as part of the team’s Spanish-language broadcast team, Valenzuela remained a beloved and mysterious hero who was never far from fans’ hearts, even though the left-hander never quite achieved those heights in his playing career again.
In a statement, Dodgers team president and CEO Stan Kasten said, “We deeply mourn Fernando’s passing on behalf of the Dodger organization.” He should be on the Mount Rushmore of franchise heroes since he is one of the most significant Dodgers of all time. Through the Fernandomania season of 1981, he inspired the fan base, and as a player and commentator, he has continued to have a special place in our hearts. We all lost him far too soon. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Linda, and his family.
There were some challenging times in Valenzuela’s association with the Dodgers; the star contested his release from the team and took years before agreeing to serve as an ambassador for the team.
How did the man who had always been cautious about the spotlight develop such a strong and lasting bond with Dodger fans?
During The Los Angeles Times’ 2021 award-winning “Fernandomania at 40” series, dramatist Luis Alfaro declared, “Fernando is the uncle who made good.” He is the relative who will always be a star. He is the María Félix of athletics and is glorified.
Early in his debut season, Valenzuela’s friendship was solidified.
Valenzuela became the first and, to this day, the only pitcher to win both the National League Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season in 1981 by using a variety of pitches, including a screwball. He shocked seasoned baseball fans by winning his first eight starts, five of them by shutout, while winding up, looking aloft almost as if seeking guidance from a higher force.
Following the fifth of those shutouts, a 1-0 victory over the Mets in New York, Vin Scully declared on the air, “It is the most puzzling, wonderful, rewarding thing I think we’ve seen in baseball in many, many years.” He also added, “And somehow this youngster from Mexico, with the pixie smile on his face, acts like he’s pitching batting practice.”
The Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in six games to win the World Series after the regular season was disrupted by a midseason players’ strike. Valenzuela was the winning pitcher in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series during the team’s postseason run. He helped the Dodgers win the pennant by limiting the Montreal Expos to one run in 8 2/3 innings.
After two Dodgers losses in New York, he started Game 3 of the World Series and pitched 147 pitches, gave up nine hits, and walked seven in a complete-game, 5-4 triumph. The Dodgers won their sixth championship in team history with the first of four straight wins.
The Dodgers had been waiting for a Mexican star to engage the Latino community in Los Angeles, and they had finally found one in Valenzuela, whose influence would change the fan base, which had hitherto been primarily white.
“Jaime, when are you going to locate and provide us with a Mexican Sandy Koufax?” was a common question Mr. Walter O’Malley would ask us when he visited Los Angeles.”I used to tell Mr. O’Malley that it’s impossible to find another Koufax, not just in Mexico but in any Latin country,” Jaime Jarrín, the Dodgers’ veteran Spanish-language commentator who retired in 2022, recalled. “He understood how crucial it was to win over the Mexican community in Southern California.”
The events leading up to 1981 may have been even more extraordinary than the season itself.
Fernando Valenzuela was born on November 1, 1960, in Etchohuaquila, a small rural village in the Mexican state of Sonora. He was the youngest of twelve children. In a village of 140 people that had only a few dirt roads when Valenzuela was a child, his parents, Avelino and Emergilda, lived with his six brothers and five sisters in a whitewashed adobe house with five rooms and no running water.
Along with playing baseball, Valenzuela and his siblings assisted in caring for the family’s crops. Even at an early age, Valenzuela made an impression, and by 1977, the Navojoa Mayos, Etchohuaquila’s local team, had signed him.
“I told myself by then that it’s a career now, and it’s not for fun,” Valenzuela said in a 2021 interview with The Times.
Valenzuela pitched well for a number of organizations, facing players much older than himself, before joining the Yucatan Leones of the Mexican League in 1979 at the age of 18.
Mike Brito, a scout with the Dodgers, was now keeping an eye on him. When Valenzuela was pitching for Guanajuato in 1978, Brito, who was a recognizable figure himself with his Panama hat, mustached smile, and ubiquitous cigar, caught sight of him. The Dodgers scout was there to look at a shortstop on the opposing side, but he was immediately drawn to Valenzuela.
Throughout his career, Brito kept up with Valenzuela’s progress and pushed the Dodgers to sign the left-hander. By July 1979, the Dodgers had paid the Leones $120,000 for Valenzuela’s contract, which was a significant sum for a Mexican player at the time. But in the end, it turned out to be a revolutionary deal. Before then, major league teams had mostly disregarded scouting in Mexico. According to Baseball America, there were less than 40 Mexican-born players in the major leagues before Valenzuela’s Dodgers debut in 1980. Since then, that figure has increased to about 150.
The Class High-A Lodi Dodgers decided that Valenzuela needed to add another pitch to his repertoire in order to advance after he spent the remainder of the 1979 season with them, starting three games and recording a 1.12 earned-run average. No one in the Dodgers system threw a split-fingered fastball, despite Brito’s suggestion that he learn one.
Brito then recalled former Lincoln High and L.A. student Bobby Castillo. A Valley College standout who had played with the Dodgers for portions of three seasons threw a screwball. Castillo taught Valenzuela the screwball in the Arizona Instructional League despite the fact that neither of them spoke Spanish or English.
Valenzuela picked it up fast.
Brito, adopting Castillo’s nickname, told The Times in 2011 that “I’m not lying to you: Within a week, Fernando was throwing the screwball as good as Babo.”
In 1980, Valenzuela flourished with the Dodgers’ Double-A affiliate in San Antonio thanks to an enlarged arsenal. The left-hander struck out a Texas League-high 162 batters in 174 innings, won 13 games, and threw 11 complete games.
When rosters grew in September, Valenzuela was called up. On September 15, 1980, he made his Dodgers debut, pitching two innings in a 9-0 loss to the Braves in Atlanta. Fanning Jerry Royster, he recorded his first MLB strikeout and gave up two unearned runs.
After the game, The Times said, “The only noteworthy Dodger performance was that of pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, who made his major league debut.”
Valenzuela pitched in 10 games and allowed no earned runs in 17 2/3 innings as the Dodgers tied the Houston Astros for first place in the NL West at the end of the regular season, putting them in a pennant race. Manager Tommy Lasorda decided to start Dave Goltz, a costly right-hander the organization had hired prior to the season but who had underperformed, over Valenzuela, then 19 years old, who had tossed two innings the day before, in the Dodger Stadium one-game playoff.
The Dodgers’ season ended with a 7-1 loss after Goltz pitched three innings and allowed four runs. For his part, Valenzuela pitched two scoreless innings while allowing just one hit.
Although it was a sign of things to come, Valenzuela was once again thrust into the public eye by a series of incidents.
After spring training in 1981, Valenzuela was a member of the Dodgers and was a mainstay in the starting rotation behind right-hander Burt Hooton and left-hander Jerry Reuss. Reuss injured his calf during a team practice the day before Dodger Stadium’s season opening against the Astros. Because Hooton and the other starting pitchers weren’t prepared to take over, Valenzuela became the first rookie pitcher in Dodgers history to start on opening day.
Regarding being told of the job, Valenzuela remarked, “I said ‘hahaha,’ because Tommy liked to make jokes.” When he said, “It’s serious, it’s not a joke,” I said, “Yeah, why not?”,”
To begin a spectacular pitching performance that captivated baseball fans and swiftly became a source of pride for Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Valenzuela went nine innings, dispersed five hits, and defeated the Astros 2-0. In his subsequent start, a 7-1 triumph over the Giants in San Francisco, he went the whole distance once more.
After that, he pitched another full game and defeated the Expos 6-1 after recording three more shutouts, one each at San Diego, Houston, and home against the Giants. Then, to complete an 8-0 start with a 0.50 ERA, he shut out the Mets once more in New York.
The impact was as quick as it was wide, and by now the clamor and attention surrounding the portly left-hander had reached a fever pitch.
After broadcasting games in Spanish since 1959, the Dodgers witnessed a rise in viewership and expressed interest in extending their radio network into Mexico. As the team’s primary play-by-play commentator, Jarrín found himself in the spotlight, translating for Valenzuela during pregame and postgame news conferences.
According to Jarrín (2021), “to the point that, in those years, the radio station ratings were usually 3.4.” With 3.4, we were satisfied. However, we would receive an 8.6 rating at KTNQ. It was the first time a radio station had done it. Fernando, Fernandomania, and the Dodgers were to blame.
During his starts, the Mexican community in Los Angeles started to swarm Dodger Stadium. With an average attendance of 48,430 during Valenzuela’s home games and 42,523 overall during the strike-shortened 1981 season, the Dodgers, who had already become the first team to draw three million fans in 1978, achieved the highest average attendance in Dodger Stadium history.
It resembled an East Los Angeles. He was like a family member you would visit every four days at Dodger Stadium, boxing historian and author Gene Aguilera told The Times in 2021.
Given the contentious past of Chavez Ravine, where Latino people were forced to leave their neighborhoods during the 1950s in order to make room for Dodger Stadium, the electrifying mood was also unexpected. The Latino population in Los Angeles never forgot that period of the city’s history, yet it was difficult to avoid Valenzuela’s quick ascent and allure for common people.
Richard Montoya, a playwright and director who presented a performance about Chavez Ravine’s history, told The Times in 2021 that “Fernando was really key for bringing the hearts and minds of la raza to the stadium.”
Longtime season ticket holder and professor emeritus Richard Santillán added: “My father laughed, and people laughed.” He looks just like a normal Mexican, according to my father. He was chubby—what they would call a gordito.
Despite missing two months of the 1981 season due to a 50-day strike, Valenzuela went on to accomplish a number of firsts during the remainder of the season, including becoming the first rookie to lead the National League in strikeouts, the second rookie to start an All-Star Game, winning a World Series, winning a Cy Young Award, and winning a Silver Slugger Award.
With an average of almost 16 victories over the following four seasons, Valenzuela maintained his position as a top-line starting pitcher. Valenzuela also became the first player to receive a $1 million salary in arbitration prior to the 1983 season, and his representatives used his enormous drawing power to support their claim.
For Valenzuela, 1986 was a productive year in a number of ways. The left-hander inked the biggest contract for an MLB pitcher at the time, a three-year deal worth $5.5 million, with the Dodgers in February. In the All-Star Game in July, he tied a record set by screwball pitcher Carl Hubbell in 1934 by striking out five straight batters.
Valenzuela tossed 20 full games to lead all of baseball and won 21 games to lead the NL, which are unprecedented in MLB today, even though the Dodgers finished 73-89.
By this time, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had come to see Valenzuela as a cult figure. His name was used in the 1987 comedy film “Born in East L.A.” Latino artists built murals of Valenzuela and wrote songs in his honor. He was hounded anytime he appeared in person at parks and schools in East Los Angeles.
Valenzuela had a 2.97 ERA, won 97 games, and thrown 84 complete games in his first six seasons without ever being placed on the injured list. Even though he was only 25 years old at the end of the 1986 season, injuries and overuse-related wear and tear prevented him from maintaining that form for the remainder of his career.
As the Dodgers swept to another World Series victory in 1988, Valenzuela was left off the playoff roster despite winning 29 games over the following three seasons.
On June 29, 1990, Valenzuela gave Dodgers fans a farewell thrill in what would be his final season with the team. Valenzuela’s old teammate from the 1981 championship squad, Dave Stewart, had earlier in the day thrown a no-hitter for the Oakland Athletics in Toronto. “That’s great, maybe we’ll see another no-hitter,” Valenzuela said to several teammates as he watched on TV in the clubhouse prior to his start at Dodger Stadium.
And Valenzuela delivered, defeating the Cardinals 6-0 to record the first-ever two-hit no-hitters thrown on the same day in modern baseball history. He forced Pedro Guerrero, another former colleague from the 1981 squad, to ground into a double play, which resulted in the last two outs.
His final victory with the Dodgers came on September 14, a 155-pitch complete game, against Cincinnati. He ended the 1990 season 13-13 with a 4.59 ERA. On the eve of the 1991 season, the day his $2.55 million contract would have become guaranteed, the Dodgers cut him go, bringing a sudden and painful end to his time with the franchise the following March.
The Dodgers had held two exhibition games in Monterrey, Mexico, earlier in spring training, giving 30-year-old Valenzuela his first MLB pitching experience in his own country. Valenzuela was still the primary attraction even after ten years had passed since the first wave of Fernandomania.
Former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley remarked at the time, “We knew Fernando’s importance to his country before we came down here, but to see it, to feel, to hear it … it was an extraordinary moment.”
To the surprise and frustration of Latino communities throughout the Southland, the Dodgers decided to move on despite his poor performance throughout spring training and his 23-26 record the previous two seasons.
Raul Montesinos, one of his fans, told The Times, “He gave them everything he had.” “It’s similar to a worker who is exhausted and fired by the boss because he is no longer useful.”
After vowing to keep pitching, Valenzuela signed a contract with the Angels in May 1991, but he was cut after just two starts. Valenzuela returned to the major leagues in 1993 after spending a year pitching in the Mexican league. Over the following five seasons, he pitched for the Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres, and St. Louis Cardinals. He won 13 games for a squad that won the National League West division in 1996, which was his greatest season.
He never pitched in the major leagues again after being traded to the Cardinals in June 1997 and then dismissed by them a month later. In 1999, Valenzuela turned down the Dodgers’ invitation to spring training. In his 17 seasons in Major League Baseball, Valenzuela won 173 games, 11 of them with the Dodgers. (With 141 career victories, he is ranked ninth on the Dodgers’ leaderboard.)
By 2003, Valenzuela’s relationship with the Dodgers had warmed up enough that he joined the team’s Spanish-language broadcast crew, assisting in game calls with Jarrín, who had supported him during the tumultuous days of Fernandomania, and Pepe Yñiguez.
Although he continued to be public in other ways, it was an avenue that allowed Valenzuela to have a high, but guarded, profile. Between 2006 and 2017, he assisted in coaching the Mexican national team four times in the World Baseball Classic. In July 2015, he obtained U.S. citizenship by attending the L.A. He led an ownership group that bought the Quintana Roo Tigres, a Mexican League team based in Cancun, in 2017; the Mexican League retired his No. 34 jersey in 2019. Convention Center, roughly three and a half miles from Dodger Stadium.
In an unofficial recognition of his impact on the team, the Dodgers had not worn that number since releasing him in 1991. However, the Dodgers firmly maintained their policy of only retiring the numbers of players who had already been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, even though Jim Gilliam’s number had been retired following his passing in October 1978.
Furthermore, despite his stellar early career, Valenzuela did not receive enough votes to be inducted (the Baseball Writers Association of America need a majority vote). He received 6.2% of the vote in 2003, his first year on the ballot, which was more than the 5% required to be on the ticket for another year. In 2004, the percentage plummeted to 3.8%, and he was not on the ballot in the following years.
In a pregame ceremony at Dodger Stadium on August 11, 2023, Valenzuela’s number was retired in honor of his lasting legacy with the Dodgers, their supporters, and the sport in general.
Prior to the wedding, Valenzuela stated, “I never imagined that this would ever happen.” “I never imagined that I would be in the World Series my rookie year. Since you must first be in Cooperstown, I didn’t think this would occur. It took me completely by surprise. It’s difficult to describe what this means.
Be the first to comment