Iconic.

Fernando Valenzuela was a movement

Thank you for reading The Dope. Glad you’re here.

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When people say you had to be there, Fernandomania is what they mean. Right now there is Shohei Ohtani, World Series bound. Before Ohtani there was Ichiro. But way before either of them, there was a squat, unathletic-looking left-handed pitcher who got signed straight out of the Mexican leagues when he was 18 by a scout who’d actually gone there to see a different player, and all he did was change Major League Baseball’s fan base forever.

In truth, Fernando Valenzuela, who died Tuesday at age 63, was a pretty fabulous athlete. He moved off the mound with surprising ease, and he won a Gold Glove. He clubbed 10 home runs and retired with a .200 lifetime batting average as a pitcher, including a season in which he hit .304 and posted a .730 OPS, a combination of on-base percentage and slugging percentage. (The MLB average OPS across all hitters in 2024 was .711.)

But that’s not it. When Valenzuela pitched, it was as if half the world was pitching with him. He always had that heavenward look during his windup. We just didn’t understand, initially, how many people were praying at that same moment.

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I covered baseball in Southern California beginning in the mid-1980s. Even now, my fingers can type Valenzuela without my brain engaging. I have no idea how many times I’ve typed that name. It’s up there with Magic and Montana.

Those two athletes were really something; their fans were legion. But the whole thing around Fernando was another level altogether. It was partly because people thought of him as a kid, I suppose. His stunning breakthrough rookie season came in 1981 (he actually got his first call-up the year before), and he was only 20 at the time. He looked like if you threw him a skateboard and a couple bucks, he’d be on his way.

But he had a screwball, for one thing, a pitch taught to him in the minor leagues by another Dodgers farmhand, Bobby Castillo. It was a killer pitch, and hitters never really did figure it out. They just sort of waited for Valenzuela’s effectiveness with it to fade. About 10 years later, it finally did.

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So Fernando had that, a basically unhittable pitch when it was thrown correctly. And his first eight starts of the 1981 season went like this: 8-0, seven complete games, five shutouts, a 0.50 ERA. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated almost before he could buy a drink.

It was all that. But it still wasn’t only that.

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Valenzuela came to us straight from the Mexican state of Sonora. He was the most blindingly brilliant baseball talent that Mexico had ever produced — and that’s still true. His was such an unexpected superstardom that it caught both him and MLB’s traditional fan base off guard, but to a mostly dormant Mexican and Mexican-American fandom, he was right on time.

Fernandomania was an international phenomenon, but you had to see it in California to really understand it. It was insane. Even now at Dodger Stadium, you’ll see as many Valenzuela jerseys in the stands as you will any other single player. (Ohtani may yet get there.) Valenzuela just unlocked this floodgate of Latino passion for the game, and his love of playing and the fun of watching him swept over the rest of us with remarkable speed. Everybody wanted in.

Broadcaster Vin Scully, a devout Catholic, once told the L.A. Times that Fernandomania “bordered on a religious experience,” and it certainly wasn’t confined to those whose families traced a Mexican lineage. The stands were packed everywhere he pitched, and the face of baseball’s mass following changed forever. Everyone agreed on Fernando.

“Every Latin American country was represented when he pitched,” former teammate Dusty Baker said a couple of years ago. “Not only Mexico. I’m talking El Salvador, Nicaragua — there’d be flags.”

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I think what clinched it was Fernando’s humility. He genuinely did not relish being a public figure, a characteristic that only made people love him more. Not to get too cute about it, but he was at heart a shy kid who lived for the game.

In his early MLB years, Valenzuela faced a severe language barrier. His catcher, Steve Scioscia, learned Spanish so they could better communicate, but in interviews Valenzuela was visibly uncomfortable. As a general rule, he spoke as little as possible, yet his connection with baseball fans was immediate, and it never wavered.

It was a sweet closing of that circle that Valenzuela ultimately became a color commentator on the Dodgers’ Spanish-language broadcasts — paid to talk, as he joked. Sometimes the cameras inside the ballpark would zoom in on Fernando in the booth, and even now, here in 2024, the Dodger Stadium crowd would immediately erupt into chants of his name. You had to be there.

Valenzuela stopped appearing on the broadcasts last month. He died at a Los Angeles hospital after a battle with liver cancer, about which he virtually never spoke. The great former L.A. Times baseball writer Ross Newhan called Fernando’s too-early passing “the seventh inning of a meteoric life,” and I can’t top that. Any of us who saw a few of those innings has reason to be grateful.