Fernando Valenzuela

Fernando Valenzuela was the person from whom I learned two critical lessons about life and politics: Representation matters but not as much as results.

Ron Vesely / Getty Images

The passing of Dodger icon Fernando Valenzuela this week hit me hard. Much harder than I imagined. The pain of losing my childhood heroes seemed like something long in the rearview mirror to me, but it wasn’t. It was right there hardly beneath the surface.

I say ‘heroes’ because I lost two of my vaunted Dodger heroes this year: I lost Fernando Valenzuela to the inevitable end we all face after the last out in the last inning of our final season. I lost his Dodger teammate Steve Garvey to MAGA as the vaunted first baseman of my childhood dreams pursues a US Senate seat by following in the footsteps of nativist Donald Trump. Garvey doesn’t belong in politics as he’s completely unaware of the hypocrisy of supporting Trump who would’ve probably objected to his young Mexican teammate, Valenzuela coming to the MLB to pitch in the big leagues.

In 1981, ironically the last year the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series, I was 10 years old. Valenzuela’s call-up to the majors on opening day in April was just over a month from my 10th birthday. There’s no greater magic than having your team of baseball heroes playing in the World Series as a ten-year-old - the magic is never more pure or impactful than at that age. Baseball is a fantasy then - complete with heroes and villains and it’s the age where everyone your age is still a prospect. Everyone still has a shot at making the Big Leagues.

But even at 10, I was aware that the Dodgers I loved looked more like the suburban kids moving into the tract homes sprawling over the orchards in my little hometown of Moorpark than they looked like me: sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and squarer jaws.

Winning one of the many division series

Moorpark was named after an apricot and that was a big part of the agricultural industry in my little hometown (pop 8500 in 1981). Moorpark had the distinct characteristic of being the only city in California during the ’80s and ’90s that had a declining Latino population. The McMansions were swallowing up the small working-class agricultural community of my youth and the parents of wealthy white professional class kids were buying faster than they could make them. The intimacy of my ethnic heritage at home had to be balanced out with my neighborhood and school friends growing whiter and wealthier every year. I had to pick up on new social cues with every grade I advanced in because I was becoming more and more of a minority every year. Of course, California itself was growing more Latino and again I had to know when to lean into my ethnicity and when to shut it down. It was a skill I had to learn to navigate a roundly changing society around me.

I think it’s precisely that skill that has made me a much better political consultant.

The largesse of Reagan’s military spending in Southern California during the Cold War fueled an economic explosion that saw dramatic increases in professional-class workers. Those workers, largely white, built their ever-bigger homes on the fields and orchards where I spent my youth. My Mexican friends shrunk as a share of the population developed a stronger bond while also recognizing we’d have to adapt to a new world emerging around us. It was a matter of survival.

Across the changing ethnic and class lines was baseball and the sound of summer - Vin Scully’s voice calling balls and strikes while telling us stories about the game, the players, and life.

The longest continuous infield team in MLB history defined those childhood summers and my little league ambitions. Ron Cey at third, Billy Russell at short, Steve Garvey at first even Dave Lopes at second who hailed from Cape Verde - all of whom looked like a Beach Boys album cover with a Portuguese side-kick.

In the middle of my changing city and state came a clap of thunder that would upend all of the established order: a left-armed pitcher with humble beginnings that would change the way I saw baseball and the world and the way the world and baseball would see my people.

Fernando Valenzuela's showing up was a society-altering development for the exploding Mexican population at the time.

Notice, that I didn’t say Latino. Sure I suppose Fernando was technically Latino but first and foremost, Fernando was Mexican. That mattered. I’m sure many Latinos across the country felt a kinship with Fernando as a Latino but none of us Mexican-Americans felt that way. He was Mexican. He was ours. He was us.

Fernando was dirt poor from the desert state of Sonora in northern Mexico - the same state as my Nana. The hardscrabble images of a very humble home surrounded by nothing but miles of dirt and sand penetrated our TV screens and Los Angeles consciousness when local news reporters found their way to his hometown of Etchohuaquila, Mexico - an isolated patch of nothing hours away from the next small town of nothing.

He was the embodiment of the poor grinding ranchero who had been coming north to labor in the United States for years.

I won’t belabor the moment. It was everything and far more than the appropriate remembrances Fernando is now receiving. “FernandoMania” was something never seen before or since in Major League Baseball. The electricity in the air in Mexican-American neighborhoods. The anxious anticipation of Fernando’s next start. Mexican kids copying his distinctive wind-up and eyes rolling north to heaven like a Saint on ecstasy. Sandlots in barrios where boys and girls taught each other their own contrived techniques of throwing a screwball. My uncles, aunts, and cousins who never cared at all about baseball now tuning in to transistor radios to the Spanish sound of Dodger announcer Jaime Jarin to get the latest on ‘El Toro’ (The Bull).

The only comparison I can make is the summer of the great chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to beat Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, but even then many of us baseball romantics had set aside the game because of the obvious cheating that was going on in the steroid era.

One of the appeals of Fernando was that he had a paunch and thick black mop of hair. He looked nothing like the chiseled professional athletes he was now teammates with. He looked like my tios. He looked like the men who ran the ranches and fields in Moorpark. He looked like my family. He looked like us.

The job of representing millions of Mexican people in one of the world’s most storied franchises fell on his shoulders. It certainly wasn’t something he’d asked for. Fernando Valenzuela was a 19-year-old kid pitching in the sandlot of a dirt farm he grew up on in the Sonoran desert and literally a couple weeks later found himself on the biggest of America’s stages. Whether he wanted it or not the pressures of that culture shock, added to those of a big league pitcher, paled in comparison to the hopes and expectations of many thousands who felt they were actually seen. Not just as the toiling underclass of one of America’s largest cities but as the biggest stars of the entire show.

Fernando represented all of us.

But he had more than the perfect biography - he also had a devastating screwball. A screwball. The only other pitcher that I knew who threw a screwball was Bugs Bunny. A screwball was a pitch that only lefties could throw well. It’s sort of a reverse curve ball and one of the reasons it was so impactful was because no hitters had ever really seen one before.

I never thought about how much pressure Fernando had to have had on his shoulders during that rookie season. He was carrying not just the weight of an innocent 19-year-old from a ranch in northern Mexico thrust onto the national scene as a popular culture phenomenon. He was not only burdened by the World Series ambitions of a team where global success was expected. He was carrying the weight of expectations for millions of little Mexican boys and girls and their parents and families to prove that he - that we - could do it.

And he did.

Fernando Valenzuela rose to meet his moment. He threw 8 straight complete-game shutouts in his first starts. He won the Cy Young and the Rookie of the Year - still the only pitcher in the history of the game to do so. He pitched in a World Series and threw a no-hitter.

The romance of baseball shows itself when it’s an allegory for life. When it proves, as it always does, that it is so much more than a game.

I was blessed to watch my Dodgers win the World Series as a ten-year-old boy and imprint the magic of our national game and my heroes forever in my heart. I was even more fortunate to watch a hero emerge, from the humble beginnings where my family began to show me that I could be somebody in my nation’s story. That I had a role to play. That I had my own journey and that even if no one looked like me, understood me, or could relate to me in the path that chose me I could still get results by throwing something at them that they’d never seen before.

And maybe, just maybe, I too could change the game in the process.

Muchisimas gracias Fernando.