Fernando Valenzuela

Fernando Valenzuela walked off the mound at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day 1981, a 20-year-old left-hander from a town of 200 people in Sonora, Mexico, and Los Angeles changed. He had just shut out the Houston Astros 2-0, striking out five, and within weeks the phenomenon had a name. Fernandomania was not simply a sports story. It was a cultural event that connected Mexican and Mexican-American communities to a franchise that had built its stadium on the rubble of their demolished neighborhood, Chavez Ravine.

Etchohuaquila to Los Angeles

Valenzuela was the youngest of twelve children in Etchohuaquila, a farming village in the municipality of Navojoa, Sonora. He pitched in Mexican baseball leagues as a teenager before the Dodgers signed him in 1979 for $120,000. He spent parts of two minor league seasons developing a devastating screwball under the tutelage of Bobby Castillo, a Dodgers reliever who taught him the pitch during instructional league. The screwball broke down and away from right-handed hitters with a motion that looked like it should have torn Valenzuela's arm apart. It never did.

He made ten relief appearances for the Dodgers at the end of 1980, allowing no earned runs in 17 and two-thirds innings. When Jerry Reuss was scratched from his Opening Day start in 1981, manager Tommy Lasorda gave the ball to Valenzuela. He did not give it back for months.

The 1981 Season

Valenzuela won his first eight starts, five of them shutouts. He completed those eight games with an ERA of 0.50. The sports media, accustomed to covering the Dodgers as a mainstream American entertainment property, scrambled to make sense of a pitcher who spoke no English, looked nothing like a conventional athlete (he was stocky, with a round face and a belly that tested the limits of his uniform), and drew tens of thousands of fans who had never before had a reason to care about baseball.

Dodger Stadium had long struggled to attract Latino fans despite sitting in the middle of the largest Mexican-American community in the United States. Valenzuela changed that overnight. On nights he pitched, attendance surged by 10,000 or more. The crowds were louder, younger, and browner than anything Dodger Stadium had seen. Vendors sold tacos and churros in the parking lot. Mariachi bands played in the stands. The Dodgers, a franchise that had displaced a Mexican-American community to build its ballpark two decades earlier, suddenly owed its cultural relevance to a Mexican kid throwing screwballs.

Valenzuela finished the strike-shortened 1981 season 13-7 with a 2.48 ERA, 180 strikeouts, and 11 complete games. He won both the Cy Young Award and the Rookie of the Year Award, becoming the first and still the only player to win both in the same season. The Dodgers won the World Series, and Valenzuela won the clinching game against the Yankees in Game 3 of the NLCS, then pitched a complete game in the World Series.

A Full Career

Valenzuela remained an effective starter for the Dodgers through the 1980s. He made six All-Star teams. He threw a no-hitter against the Cardinals on June 29, 1990, the same night that Dave Stewart of the Oakland Athletics also threw a no-hitter, the only time two no-hitters occurred on the same day in major league history. He won 141 games and struck out 2,074 batters over a 17-year career that took him to the Angels, Orioles, Phillies, Padres, and Cardinals before ending in 1997.

His arm eventually wore down, and the screwball, which put enormous torque on the elbow and shoulder, took its toll. The Dodgers released him after the 1990 season, a decision that angered the fanbase and felt like ingratitude from a franchise that had profited enormously from his presence.

Beyond the Box Score

Valenzuela's impact on baseball in Los Angeles and across Latin America extended far beyond his pitching statistics. He made Dodger Stadium feel like it belonged to the people who lived around it. He proved that a player who looked different, spoke a different language, and came from a different world could become the biggest star in the biggest market in American sports. He opened a door that generations of Mexican and Latin American players walked through after him.

He died on October 22, 2024, in Los Angeles, at age 63. The Dodgers retired his number 34 posthumously. The tributes from fans filled the streets around Chavez Ravine with flowers, candles, and jerseys, a community mourning the man who had given them a team to call their own.