Fernando Valenzuela, a Mexican-born left-handed pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, captivated 20-year-old baseball fans during the 1981 season with a witty windup that produced his signature screwball. He is 63 years old.
Reports confirmed his death Cheaters and Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert D. No cause of death for Manfred Jr. has been released. Valenzuela stepped down from Dodgers broadcasting earlier this month to focus on his health and plans to return for the 2025 season, the team said.
Valenzuela won his first eight starts in spectacular fashion: five of his wins were shutouts and seven complete games. His earned run average is a minus 0.50.
“He’s got the world on a string — and it’s 8-0,” headlined The Los Angeles Times.
Valenzuela was somewhat successful for the rest of the season, which was marred by a nearly two-month-long players’ strike. His 13-7 record and 2.48 ERA were enough to win the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards, the only player to win both in the same year.
He continued to hit in the 1981 postseason, with a 3–1 record, including a complete game shutout in Game 3 of the World Series against the Yankees. Although he wasn’t at his best — he gave up nine hits and seven walks and threw 146 pitches — Valenzuela helped turn the Dodgers around against the Yankees, who had won the first two games. The Dodgers won the next three games to clinch the series.
As Valenzuela began his windup, he looked to the sky as he raised his arms above his head and lowered them to meet his high-kicking right leg. His eyes seemed to roll back in his head like some kind of ecstasy.
Over 67 seasons, said Dodgers announcer Vin Scully, who watched Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Newcomb pitch. Los Angeles Times In 1991, there was something different about the games played by Valenzuela a decade earlier.
“Fernandomania borders on a religious experience,” he said. “Fernando was Mexican, came from nowhere, and it was as if the Mexicans grabbed him with both hands for a ride to the moon.”
“He’s one of the most impressive young pitchers I’ve ever seen,” Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorta told New York Times columnist George Vesey at the start of the 1981 season. “I can’t compare his stats or his skills to anybody.”
Valenzuela’s impressive start sparked the “Fernandomania” phenomenon. His games filled Dodger Stadium and ballparks around the league. Merchandise sales soared, television ratings soared and media attention from US and Mexican journalists peaked. Topic from Sports Illustrated Issue of May 18 Read, “False!”
Valenzuela was also a guest at a White House luncheon hosted by President Reagan in honor of Mexican President José López Portillo.
“Every Latin American country was represented when he pitched,” said one of his teammates, an outfielder and future manager. Dusty Baker told mlb.com in 2021. “Not just Mexico, I’m talking El Salvador, Nicaragua. There will be flags.”
Fernando Valenzuela was born on November 11, 1960, in Navojoa, Mexico, and grew up in Ezohuaquila, where his parents, Avelino and María Valenzuela, owned a small farm. Fernando played soccer as a boy, but excelled in baseball.
Valenzuela was discovered by chance in 1978 when Dodgers scout Mike Prieto traveled to Cilav, Mexico to watch shortstop Ali Uscanga play in a Mexican Rookie League game. His attention was distracted by Valenzuela, who struck out 12 batters for Silao’s opponent that day, Guanajuato.
“I can’t believe he’s only 17” Brito later told Sports Illustrated.
The Dodgers signed Valenzuela the following year and sent him to the minor leagues, where he supplemented his fastball and curveball with a screwball he learned from Bobby Castillo, one of the team’s pitchers. Valenzuela soon caught on.
A screwball requires a left-hander like Valenzuela to stick his wrist in the opposite direction of other breaking balls so that it fades away from the right-handed batter.
“It’s an unnatural pitch, the exact opposite of the curve,” Carl Hubbell, one of Screwball’s best coaches with the New York Giants, told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Valenzuela’s screwball, “The best after mine.”
The pitch is so rarely mastered that Tyler Kepner, a former national baseball writer for The New York Times who is now with The Athletic, described it as the “baseball of baseball” in his 2018 book, “K: A History of Baseball.” In ten pitches.”
After one full season in the Dodgers’ minor league organization with its San Antonio Double A team (his record was 13-9 with a 3.10 ERA), Valenzuela was called up by the parent club. In 10 games, as a reliever, he did not surrender an earned run and won both of his starts.
Following his breakout rookie season in 1981, he pitched for the Dodgers until 1990. He finished third in Cy Young voting in 1982, when he had a 19-13 record, with a 2.47 ERA, and won 21 games in 1986. His profession, and He pitched as a no-hitter On June 29, 1990, against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“If you’ve got a sombrero,” Scully said after the finale, “throw it up in the sky!”
Valenzuela’s no-hitter at that point in his career was surprising. He has struggled throughout the season and surrendered eight earned runs in his previous start. And he was tired in the last three innings.
“This kind of fatigue doesn’t bother me,” he later told reporters. “Do you think I felt anything during that last inning? No way.”
He finished that season with a 13-13 record and a 4.59 ERA, the highest of his career to that point, and was released by the Dodgers early the following year on the day his $2.55 million contract became guaranteed.
Over the next seven seasons, he tried and failed to recapture his past success. He pitched for the California (now Los Angeles) Angels and a team in the Mexican Baseball League, then returned to the majors with the Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres and Cardinals, who released him for a month in July 1997. After he was traded there by the Padres.
His 2-12 record ended his major league career, but he continued in the Mexican Winter League for a few years into his 40s.
In total, His career record is 173-153 with a 3.54 ERA He was selected to six All-Star games, including one that he started in 1981, his rookie season. The Dodgers have his number in 2023. Retired at 34.
His survivors include his wife, Linda; four children, Fernando Jr., Ricardo, Linda and Maria Fernando; and seven grandchildren, According to Major League Baseball.
Valenzuela returned to the Dodgers in 2003 as an analyst for its Spanish-language radio broadcasts and was beloved by fans.
“When I was playing, I was afraid to speak” he told the Los Angeles Times In 2004. “Being in front of the microphone was not my first choice. But now, I love it.”
John Yoon Contributed report.
