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Fernando Valenzuela, who died at 63, built a legacy in Chavez Ravine

Vaseline October 23, 2024

Game 1 of the World Series will be held on stolen land on Friday evening.

It has always been the most uncomfortable and disturbing truth about a Dodgers franchise that left Brooklyn and blossomed again in this beautiful corner of Los Angeles called Chavez Ravine: that to build what became Dodger Stadium, perhaps the greatest diamond of them all , nearly 2,000 families, most of them of Mexican American descent, were strongly armed and forced to leave their homes.

It was the ugliest bait: Public housing, ostensibly supposed to house even more families, was supposed to emerge from the Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop communities, but instead it was set aside for a sports team, fueling an era of government subsidies and land grabs would enrich owners and increase their franchise values.

Less tangible: The mountains of generational wealth have been wiped out with those homes, and this year California lawmakers tried to pass the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act, a bill that would provide reparations to displaced families. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it earlier this month.

Yet the baseball gods, such as they are, work in the strangest of ways, as cold as they are cruel.

Less than twenty years after Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, 22 years after the club landed from Brooklyn, Fernando Valenzuela blessed the country with his arrival from Mexico. Still just twenty years old, born in the period between 1960 when the Dodgers played their games at the Coliseum, he was a baseball comet, landing in the late 1980s and producing the greatest, or at least most infamous, rookie season for a pitcher in the baseball history.

Fernandomania cannot be repeated, nor in the stunning first five weeks of the 1981 season, when he started eight games, completed seven, posted an 0.50 ERA, pitched five shutouts and ushered in a new era of runaway prosperity for the Dodgers heralded.

Also, we probably won’t see a rookie season end the way Fernando did: a complete game of 147 pitches to stifle the New York Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series and take a commanding 3-1 lead – just a week before his 21st.^st birthday.

The Dodgers would shut out those Yankees in six games, soothing some of the bad taste of losing consecutive Series to them in 1977-78.

OPINION: Dodgers icon Fernando Valenzuela is gone. But ‘Fernandomania’ will live forever.

And with Fernando on the mound and an increasingly diverse crowd watching from the seats at Dodger Stadium, or listening to the dulcet tones of Vin Scully or Jaime Jarrin on a transistor radio, the Dodgers became the giant franchise they are today.

The funny thing about displacement, borders and odious xenophobia: they cannot stop progress and prosperity.

And goodness, the post-Fernando Dodgers thrived.

Their run to the NL pennant in 1978 drew a franchise-record 3.3 million fans to Dodger Stadium, but attendance fell below 3 million two years later. The year of Fernandomania was tarnished by a work stoppage, which limited the season to 110 games.

Strike years usually have a dampening effect on dissatisfied fans, sometimes lasting decades. But the coming year of a World Series title and a young lefty looking skyward drew a record 3.6 million fans through the gates of Dodger Stadium in 1982.

LA was changing and so was the Dodger fan base: while the smiling face of seemingly all-American first baseman Steve Garvey was the face of the 1970s Dodgers, it was eventually supplemented by Latino stars like Valenzuela, Pedro Guerrero and finally Ramon and Pedro Martinez.

And in Fernando, a Mexican American community often cooped up in the shadows of LA had a hero to celebrate. Los Angeles, a business city whose machinations would not be possible without the contributions of immigrants who came from Mexico for a better life or who fled the struggle in Central America, was suddenly truly reflected among its fan base.

That growth at the turnstiles? It hasn’t stopped. Sure, it was delayed by News Corp.’s incompetent ownership period. and the total plundering of the franchise by Boston’s Frank McCourt, but the Dodgers have drawn no fewer than 3.7 million fans since 2013.

The Dodgers’ new ownership group certainly understands investment and growth, and the $700 million investment in Shohei Ohtani has maxed out the century-old ballpark’s capacity: nearly 4 million fans, tops in the majors, and about 50,000 deep, even for the proverbial midweek evening in April against the Diamondbacks.

And oh, what a team: Shohei and Yoshi and Teo and Mookie and Kiké and Freddie, winners of 98 matches, NL champions, playing to packed houses every night.

Perhaps too loud for some, but undoubtedly a damn treat for a fanbase that couldn’t celebrate a championship during the pandemic year of 2020. They roar to the cues of organist Dieter Ruehle and groove to the ruthless tones of favorite son Kendrick. Lamar, just like their melting pot of a clubhouse.

Friday night it will all coincide with the ultimate baseball matchup: Yankees-Dodgers, Game 1 of the World Series, an unmistakable SoCal touch to it all. Jack Flaherty will face Gerrit Cole, a biracial guy from the Valley versus a white guy from Orange County, 818 versus 714 in the 323, a match-up similar to the 50,000-plus paying big bucks to witness it.

And this is where the baseball gods, such as they are, occasionally unleash their despicable cruelty.

Valenzuela, whose number was permanently retired two seasons ago and whose voice and image lent regal aura to the Dodgers’ Spanish-language TV and radio broadcasts, won’t be there. His death at 63 Tuesday night comes at the cruellest moment: the solemn version of Willie Mays’ tragic passing on the West Coast, just days before Major League Baseball honored him at Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field.

Now Game 1 will be an impromptu memorial, similar to Rickwood, a time to mourn a loss but also appreciate that extended family will be together to do so.

There will likely be no more odes to the families who once inhabited that land, and those who want to heal them are now back to the drawing board. The Dodgers have won five World Series titles there, but they are just ballplayers, incapable of correcting such grave injustices.

And Fernando was just a pitcher. But what he built in Chavez Ravine will last forever.

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