The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Fernando Valenzuela:
Baseball, Real Estate and Politics in Los Angeles

Oct 28, 2024

Los Angeles players are wearing a patch on their uniforms during the World Series honoring Fernando Valenzuela, the Dodgers’ former pitching ace who died on October 22 at age 63.

No wonder. When Valenzuela first stepped onto the mound in the spring of 1981, he wasn’t just a pitching sensation, so unhittable that he threw one shutout after another. He was a Mexican ballplayer, marketed as Fernandomania by Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, to greatly expand the Dodgers fanbase.

Before Valenzuela, a big part of the population in Los Angeles shunned the Dodgers. Back in the early 1960s, the Dodgers owners had built Dodgers Stadium on stolen land. This land, overlooking downtown Los Angeles, had been a semi-rural village made up of over 1,800 working-class families, mostly Mexican American. In 1951, the city of Los Angeles used eminent domain to evict all of them to make room for what they said was a federally funded public housing project. Most families received a token sum of a few thousand dollars, and they were promised that they could be resettled into those new housing units.

The housing plan was eventually abandoned, but by then most of the neighborhood was already cleared. So, in 1958 city officials offered the land to the Dodgers’ owners for little more than a pretty penny. A year later, only a few holdouts remained in the neighborhood. On May 9, 1959, the city moved to evict the group. TV cameras captured one particularly ugly confrontation in which sheriff’s deputies dragged an entire family from the property.

The way the refugees saw it, the L.A. Dodgers and their stadium had destroyed their community. When the ballpark finally opened in 1962, some threw tomatoes into the parking lot. Many Angelenos swore to never, ever attend a baseball game at the stadium.

But the unhittable pitching of Valenzuela, a 20-year-old Mexican from the small town of Etchohuaquila, changed all that. Attendance swelled to its highest ever. After 22 years of Dodgers’ baseball in Los Angeles, O’Malley had finally cashed in on the pitcher he considered his Mexican Sandy Koufax.

Politicians didn’t miss out on all the hype of Fernandomania, either. In June 1981, President Ronald Reagan invited Valenzuela to a state luncheon with the president of Mexico, José López Portillo, and sat Valenzuela between the two presidents. All the high officials, including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, etc. lined up to get an autographed baseball from Valenzuela. These were the same politicians who demonized millions of undocumented immigrants of Mexican descent in the U.S.

As for Valenzuela, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda played him until his once-powerful left arm hung like a torn rubber band—yet another overworked immigrant in Los Angeles, as an L.A.Times columnist, Gustavo Arrellano, wrote. Although Valenzuela went on to play another ten seasons in the majors, he was never the same dominant pitcher.