Fernando Valenzuela. 1981 World Series. Game 3.
For some baseball players, even good ones, creating a personality can be harder than hitting a backdoor slider.
Like almost all athletes in any sport, baseball players learn a small set of safe, familiar phrases with which they address virtually every public question.
We can say them before the players open their mouths. “It’s all about the team. I love these guys.” “I just tried to stay in the zone.” “No one believed in us, but we believed in ourselves.” “I was just looking for something I could drive.” “This is what we worked for all year.” “We just keep grinding. This team never quits.”
They aren’t lying. They just aren’t telling us anything, and it’s a collateral consequence that in most cases they create no personality. Mike Trout is one of the great players of modern baseball. We have no sense that there’s anything else there — which is how Trout apparently wants it, which is fine. It’s his call. We aren’t angry at him. We just don’t really have any sense of him, except as a great player.
Still, this boilerplate blandness is one reason we are drawn to any player who breaks the code. and if that player also happens to be particularly good at baseball, the intrigue grows. Can you say “Reggie Jackson”?
Right now, however, what we might want to say is “Fernando Valenzuela.”
Valenzuela died Tuesday at the young age of 63, struck out by liver cancer. His death immediately and fittingly triggered waves of remembrance about the spring of 1981, when at the age of 20 he made one of the most spectacular debuts in Major League history.
As a rookie starter for the Los Angeles Dodgers — though he had appeared in 10 games the previous season as a reliever — he threw five shutouts in his first eight games, during which he went 8–0 with a 0.50 earned run average.
That was enough to create what was clumsily called Fernandomania. First Dodgers fans and then all baseball fans wanted to see this kid. He didn’t have the classic Greek god build and it was almost bizarre how he glanced up to the sky at the top of his windup. But whatever was happening, it was working.
Off the field, he wasn’t a hot dog. He also wasn’t a deer in the headlights. He was a somewhat shy kid, youngest of 12 children born to a large family in hardscrabble Mexico, and it’s understandable that finding himself under the bright lights of America’s most celebrity-crazed city would not be something he had trained for. But when a camera or microphone pointed at him, which quickly became almost all the time, he exuded an endearing sense of contagious wonderment. Whatever was happening, he was having fun and we were having fun, not to mention seeing some really good baseball.
In the end, of course, personality fades if it’s not backed by talent. Valenzuela did not fade. He would eventually pitch in the Majors through 1997, wearing six different uniforms and finishing his career with a record of 173–153 and an ERA of 3.54. He had one season, 1986, in which he won 20 games, and he threw a no-hitter in 1990, his last season with the Dodgers. Those stats are good. Unlike what happened in his first few weeks, they aren’t off the charts, and to put him in full-career perspective, he has not been a serious candidate for the Hall of Fame.
There was one game, however, and it was none of those early shutouts, that confirmed Valenzuela was not just a passing comet.
As noted by many commentators after his death, that was the third game of the 1981 World Series. Which, many commentators also noted, was played exactly 43 years ago, on October 23.
The Dodgers were playing the New York Yankees, who famously had beaten them eight of the previous 10 times they had met in the World Series.
The 1981 Series began with the Yankees looking like they’d handily make it nine of 11. They knocked out Dodgers ace Jerry Reuss in Game 1, then got a shutout from former Dodger Tommy John and Goose Gossage in Game 2.
So the Dodgers pretty much had to win Game 3, since no team has ever come back from 0–3 in the World Series. While Valenzuela had cooled down and finished the regular season 13–7, LaSorda gave him the ball over veteran Bob Welch.
Ron Cey gave the Dodgers the lead with a three-run homer in the first, then Valenzuela gave up two runs in the second and another two in the third. This included two home runs, so no, he was not having a lockdown game. He would give up nine hits and seven walks, throwing 147 pitches — a stat we may never see in baseball again.
But after the third inning he didn’t give up another run. The Yankees had baserunners in every inning except one through the eighth, when they put two on with nobody out and Bobby Murcer batting. Murcer tried a bunt, something else we would probably not see today, and when he popped it into the air, Cey made a great catch and doubled Larry Milbourne off first.
Pitch count notwithstanding, Valenzuela took it from there, retiring the last four Yankees to win the game and turn the series around. The Dodgers won four straight, raising their World Series record against the Yankees to 3–8, which will change one way or the other this year.
That one game, as much as any of the other 461 he pitched over 17 seasons, confirmed Valenzuela was more than a shooting star or a mania. On a night when he clearly didn’t have his best stuff, and when a good-hitting team got to him early, he soldiered through it. When pitchers stay in a game through several rotations of the other team’s batting order, both sides get to know each other, and that’s often considered an advantage for hitters. A good pitcher can turn it around and make it work the other way. Fernando Valenzuela, on that night and many other nights, was that pitcher.
Like 32, 34 was a good number for the Dodgers.
