For most of the 1980s, and all the 1990s but the last four months, I lived in Southern California. I never made it to Disneyland or Yosemite. I didn’t get up to Edwards Air Force Base to watch the Space Shuttle land, nor visit Universal Studios or Hearst Castle.
But I did take my kids to Dodger Stadium to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch.
It was 1990, in what would turn out to be his final season with the Dodgers. My daughter and son were very young – five and two. We took the train from Oceanside, and a bus from Union Station to Chavez Ravine, where once stood a Mexican-American neighborhood that was forcibly removed in the 1940s to make way for a public housing project that never happened.
The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 on the promise of a sweetheart deal between the team owner and the city, in which the Dodgers acquired public land in the heart of the city for their new ballpark. The Mexican-Americans so recently evicted from that land saw no compelling reason to buy tickets.
Fernando Valenzuela gave them one. The youngest of twelve kids, from a small town in Mexico, he learned baseball at the feet of his older brothers. A Dodger scout discovered him there.
He started the first game of the 1981 season as an emergency replacement and shut out the Houston Astros. Four of his next five starts were shutouts; all were complete-game wins. He won his first eight games. Latinos in Los Angeles flocked to the stadium on the nights he pitched. He was 20 years old.
I liked him from the start. What was not to like? The way he rolled his eyes to the sky right before releasing a pitch? His chubby body that belied his athleticism? That he could hit and field as well as pitch? That his money pitch was a screwball? That he pitched complete games? That he was left-handed, like Sandy Koufax, like me?
His incredible rookie season was interrupted by baseball’s first prolonged strike, which wiped out the middle third of the season. But the Dodgers got into the World Series that year, against the Yankees.
The Yankees won the first two games in New York. Fernando started the next game in Los Angeles. He gave up four runs in the first three innings. But his manager, Tommy Lasorda, stuck with him. No more Yankees crossed the plate that day. The Dodgers rallied, and at the end of the game, there was Fernando, shaking hands with his catcher after a 146-pitch, 5-4 victory. They won the next three games to take the Series in six.
Fernando died on October 22, three days before the Dodgers would face the Yankees in the Series again, and nine days short of his 64th birthday. We were contemporaries. I was a kid when he burst on the scene with his cherubic face and unhittable screwball. By 1990 I was a parent, and he was a veteran, an established major-league star. An arm injury had left him diminished, but he could still move the ball around and keep hitters off-balance. His best years behind him, he still put fans in the seats.
I wanted my kids’ first live big-league game to be memorable. Despite its dubious history, Dodger Stadium is a landmark. It’s where Koufax pitched his perfect game, and where Vin Scully spun literature out of thin air on the radio.
Valenzuela lost that Sunday afternoon, 2-0, to the Cincinnati Reds, but he pitched well. He led off the sixth with a double to break up the opposing pitcher’s no-hit bid. He could hold his own at the plate, accumulating 10 home runs, 84 runs batted in, and a career batting average of .200, which is good for a pitcher.
The Dodgers released him before the start of the 1991 season. Over the next few years, he played for several teams in the big leagues and his native Mexico. I saw him a few more times when he pitched for the Padres in the late 1990s, getting by on his smarts and not much else, but still sometimes able to find the right pitch in the right situation and remind everyone of his youthful brilliance.
Adios, Fernando. You were an artist with a baseball, an ambassador for your people, and an avatar of joy for those of us who simply loved watching you work.
