Author: Scoop

His baseball career was good, not great. His W-L record was 175-153, but his career had several interesting facets that made him unique:

1. He may have been the best attendance draw in modern times. Fernando was only a rookie in 1981 but was an absolute phenomenon. He threw a shutout on opening day, in his first major league start. He allowed only two earned runs through his first seven starts. At one point he was 8-0 with a 0.50 ERA. For the year, he led the National League in shutouts, and posted an excellent 2.48 ERA. He won the Rookie of the Year award as well as the Cy Young. Because he was so great that year, and because he was a Mexican-American in the heart of Latino country, he started to inflate attendance numbers wherever he went. It was the year of Fernandomania. Valenzuela had other great years. He led the league in wins in 1986, and tossed a no-no in his last year with the Dodgers, but that was all post-script. In that bitter strike-shortened year of 1981, he was baseball’s positive counter-narrative. El Toro was THE story. He was baseball. He was magic.

2. He was 5-1 in the post season throughout his career, and his success was especially critical in the 1981 World Championship year. Yesterday I discussed the last Dodger team to beat the Yankees in the World series – that was the very 1981 club in which Fernando had made the debut detailed above. Fernando followed up a great regular season with a win in each post-season series. He pitched the deciding game in the NLCS, allowing only three hits, then tossed a complete game World Series victory. That was the Dodgers’ first home game after they had fallen behind two games to zero on the road. Do you think the fans showed their hero some love that day? Fernando could have been elected mayor of L.A. if the election had been held that day. Perhaps unanimously. The Dodgers never lost another game in that series.

3. Although Fernando was a lefty, he had “reverse platoon” statistics, meaning that he was tougher on right-handed batters than on lefties. (For you non-fans, this is unusual.) His go-to pitch was a screwball, which breaks like the pitch of a right-hander. This pitch, difficult and unnatural to throw, some say arm-injuring, was once the signature offering of baseball legends like Christy Mathewson and Carl Hubbell, but is basically non-existent today.

ESPN’s obit