Fernando Valenzuela, RIP

The most dramatic baseball player I ever watched.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been saying that for the third statue at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles after the current Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax bronzes, the franchise should hurry up and install a Fernando Valenzuela statue while Fernando is still around to enjoy the honor.

Oh, well … the uniquely charismatic 1980s pitcher has died at age 63.

Valenzuela was the most dramatic ballplayer I’ve ever seen, a tubby Mexican guy with a certain genius for baseball who willed his unimpressive body into near greatness for a half-dozen seasons before burning his arm out.

In his Cy Young-winning season of 1981, Fernando was a 20-year-old rookie pitcher from Mexico (who, admittedly, looked like he was 37 — if the Dodgers had announced in 1980 that they had signed a South-of-the Border legend with a career record over 19 Mexican League seasons of 301-227, it would have seemed just as plausible as their assertion that Fernando was a teenager). He started the 1981 season with eight straight complete game wins, five of them shutouts. (In contrast, the 2024 Dodger pitching staff altogether had a total of one shutout and one complete game.)

Whenever Fernando pitched, attendance would soar as Mexicans and gringos rushed to the ballpark to cheer on the peculiar phenom. The Dodgers’ huge Hispanic fan base and league-leading attendance figures are often attributed to 1981’s Fernandomania, although in truth the Dodgers had usually enjoyed impressive turnouts since arriving in Los Angeles in 1958 (and, in Brooklyn, since installing Pee-Wee Reese at shortstop in 1940). But it sure can’t have hurt the Dodgers’ local popularity to have had ethnic heroes Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela, two of the more heroic pitchers in baseball lore.

Fernando remains the greatest Mexican-born player in baseball history. Oddly, the second highest career Wins Above Replacement for a Mexican is held by Valenzuela’s look-alike distant kinsman Teddy Higuera Valenzuela, another 1980s lefthanded screwballer, whom Fernando struck out in the 1986 All Star game. That year, they became the first two Mexican-born pitchers to win 20 games in a season. Valenzuela and Higuera are two of the most similar star players in baseball history, except that Fernando was enormously famous while Teddy was obscure. With Fernando’s death filling the headlines, I have the terrible feeling that if Teddy dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would notice.

Still, to young fans who only know Valenzuela from his statistics, it’s hard to understand his fame. Even in his 1981-1986 prime before his arm wore out from too many screwballs, Fernando’s stats were good but not great.

That he couldn’t (or, at least initially, wouldn’t) speak English only added to his mystique. His pudgy physique increased his Everyman appeal. Pitching never came easy to him. He labored on the mound. His elaborate windup, in which his eyes rolled back in his head like a Baroque martyr offering up a last prayer, was designed to put the maximum possible torque on his screwball. (The screwball pitch, by the way, is virtually extinct. This month, Dodger long reliever Brent Honeywell threw the first postseason screwball since 2008.) Constantly behind in the count with men on base, Fernando pitched himself out of innumerable jams.

For example, his World Series-saving win over the New York Yankees in 1981 (despite all the complaints on Twitter about the big market teams buying their way into the World Series this year, the previous LA-NY World Series was 43 long years ago) was as melodramatic as any telenovela. Starting on short rest, Valenzuela allowed 16 baserunners but still somehow went all the way, throwing 147 pitches, to triumph 5-4 in the prototypical Fernando performance.