I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1972. My dad is buried on a hill that faces Dodgers Stadium. My first sports event memory in person is going to the stadium and getting $2 seats in the bleachers in left field staring at the back of Dusty Baker for nine innings.
My first broken heart was when I was just five years old and Reggie Jackson owned us in the first World Series I can remember. He was Mr. October to the world, but to me he was that asshole who broke my heart.
Growing up there was one not-so-unspoken rule in my dad’s house: don’t interrupt dad when he’s watching the Dodgers on TV.
What if I’m dead?
I’ll be sad, but you’re body will keep for a couple of hours.
I made that up, sure, but it’s not very far from the truth.
In September of 1980 I was a month away from turning eight years old. That’s when the Dodgers brought up some Mexican kid to pitch relief for the last few string of games. He had beautiful brown skin and spoke no English. That was an apt description for a lot of the kids I went to school with at Harrison Elementary. I did not properly understand how significant this kid on the mound would become to so many. Yet.
I think that was also the season Nolan Ryan no-hit us as an Astro. I could Google it, but fuck no. It was definitely the season the Phillies won the World Series. This is the useless information that sticks around in the mind of a 52 year old four decades later.
By Opening Day of 1981 I was all set to watch the Dodgers with my dad because I loved the Dodgers and I worshipped my dad.
It’s time for Dodger baseball, that gorgeous voice said on the TV.
That Mexican kid came to the mound and the world changed.
Let me give you non-angelinos a little backstory on the Dodgers Stadium. The land upon which it sits is called Chavez Ravine because back in the day (the day being somewhere around 1840) a twenty-seven year old kid named Julian Chavez bought the land as an investment. Through it’s history it has been home to Chinese immigrants, Mexican immigrants, Jewish immigrants, a lot of time all three. Once upon a time the first Jewish cemetery in LA was housed there.
But then, as these things happen, 1the money showed up and people were 86’d from the land to build a stadium for that team from Brooklyn. As you can imagine, this pissed a lot of people off, but they were poor and mostly people of color so LA was all, fuck ‘em.
What this meant at the time when that Mexican kid took the mound was that a city largely populated by other Mexican kids and descendants of former Mexican kids was not exactly loved by all those gorgeous brown skinned people of Mexican descent. The largest demographic in LA wasn’t interested.
Enter our hero: Fernando Valenzuela.
Without realizing he was changing the greatest city in America (suck it New York), he did just that. He took the mound that Opening Day and started a landslide of passion for a team and a city that had spent decades marginalizing the very people who looked and talked just like him. Where once upon a time chicanos skipped going to Dodgers stadium, now they were the largest block of fans.
Suddenly, every beautiful brown-skinned kid was wearing Dodger Blue. Even if they didn’t speak English, we all could say: Los Doyers!
Every kid, beautiful brown skinned boys and girls, white kids, Asian kids, black kids, Jewish kids, every fucking one of us wanted to pitch in little league. Every single one of us tried rolling our eyes back as we wound up. Almost every single one of us ended up throwing the baseball/tennis ball nowhere near the strike zone when we did that. 2Even through the strike that season, we were all rabid. Infected by Fernandomania.
We went to so many Dodgers games in my childhood that I can’t honestly say we went that season to see number 34 pitch, or if it was one of the other seasons. I just know I was lucky enough to see him pitch in person from the nosebleeds in left field a few times in my childhood.
When he told us to be smart, stay in school in his broken English, we listened. He was ours. He was mine. The Dodgers were my team because he was my pitcher. They were each a thread that wove between me and dad, my community.
I was too young to realize that my pitcher was weaving an entire country of people that had spent so much time feeling forgotten, marginalized, and unwanted together. It’s easy to see it in hindsight. There are beautiful brown skinned communities all over the United States and when he came to town they had someone they could point to and say, see, we are capable of greatness.
Because we are.
Thank you for reminding us of that, Fernando.
https://www.callutheran.edu/college-arts-sciences/history/civilliberties/chavez_ravine_civil_liberties_ver2.html
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/1981_strike
