Fernando Valenzuela’s No. 34 was retired on Friday, Aug. 11, and my beloved and beaten up Rawlings baseball mitt — once marked indelibly by the iconic L.A. Dodger — is nowhere, absolutely nowhere, to be found.
Gone.
Lost in the background noise of growing up.
Sorry, Fernando.
All I have now is a fading memory, and a sharp ping of shame about a day when my prized beaten up leather gauntlet and “Fernandomania” collided, and became forever etched somewhere in the back of my now middle-aged mind.
But as Fernando’s number is immortalized, it’s got my neurons firing. Flashbacks. Memories. Some song with the chorus, “….Fernando Valenzuela…,” is on replay in my head.
It was a balmy 1980s-era day game at Dodger Stadium. The mania sweeping L.A. — and the story that fueled it — had by now been firmly established: The humble kid from Mexico, who rose from the obscurity and poverty of a small Sonoran town to the Big Leagues to capture the imagination of a city.
He didn’t yet have English-language skills. But what he did have was a funky, unconventional, and downright mean pitch — the Screwball — that humbled Big League hitters from Day 1, when coming out of the bullpen he got the starting job in that famous 1981 season opener. A 20-year-old unknown with longish black hair, skinny legs and a bit stout, penciled in to start for an injured Jerry Reuss.
Talk about seizing the moment. Fernando did. And the rest, of course, is baseball legend – and L.A. cultural history, at that.
But I digress.
My mom — herself born in Mexico — was captivated by Fernando and his story, an immigrant tale. She, too, along with the rest of L.A. and its ever burgeoning Latino population in the 1980s, was ever tuned in to their hero, who looked liked them, who spoke like them, whose rise in the culture paralleled their own aspirations.
In stark contrast, I was the kid, born and raised in Southern California, who could barely speak his mother’s native tongue.
I was a latchkey-ish teen whose early influences, as mom worked to bring home the bacon, gravitated away from his Mexican roots and toward what was in front of me growing up in suburban L.A. You know: The Sherman Oaks Galleria, BMX bikes, that kind of stuff.
It took me years to relish and appreciate the tamales my mom made. For me, it was more about Western Bacon Cheeseburgers, Farrell’s ice cream and Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas Barbecue, not exactly a hub for mariachis.
She was giddy as heck for Fernando. I was ambivalent. Steve Sax, Dusty Baker, Kenny Landreaux … these were my guys at the time, not Fernando, nor his cultural relevance.
But she and I were on common ground when it came to Dodgers games. And for a kid, there’s nothing like the anticipation of catching a foul ball. So, armed with my trusty glove and my binoculars, I was more than ready to catch a day game, and to catch a foul ball.
It didn’t matter that our seats were way too high up, in the upper deck above right field.
I don’t remember much about the game, other than the afternoon sun blaring down on us. I’m hazy on whether Fernando actually pitched, though I think he did, and lost.
And you guessed it: No foul ball. Not even close.
But what we would “catch” after the game would become so much greater.
After the contest, we stayed a bit late. (Apparently, the ushers back then may have let you stay a little longer).
Much of the crowd had left. We’d gone down to the deck below to scout out seats we wished we could have someday. As we left, sure enough, in the flesh, on the concourse, there was Fernando and his small, quiet entourage, including his wife.
Pretty sure mi madre was speechless. Sin palabras. Pretty sure I was scared. Pretty sure Fernando — by that point in plain clothes, presumably just showered and out of the clubhouse — and the small group with him just wanted to keep walking.
But no, they stopped for us. Spanish was spoken. And I didn’t have to ask. Fernando — the unassuming legend to be — reached out to sign my glove in a blue pen, right on the outside, on one of the finger stalls.
Fernando’s autograph. Right there. On my mitt. My mother: Face to face with her hero. It was a cellphone selfie moment in the era of Reagan, years before such snaps existed.
Get that thing in a safe deposit box, right? Nope.
Years would go by. I’d play youth baseball throughout my teens with that mitt, dirtying it up, breaking it in even more. I even remember the signature slowly fading over the years.
And then suddenly, one day, the signature was gone. And then another day, the glove just wasn’t there. And then another day, years later, mom was gone, leaving a legacy of the quiet pride and humility that Fernando personified.
And so, something like 40 years after that chance encounter, No. 34 was retired on Friday. Way overdue. And you get this flashback from me. Kind of sad, yeah?
Maybe for a minute. But I reached out to Joseph L. Price, director at the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College. He manages the artifacts of The Baseball Reliquary in Whittier.
After an initial “d’oh!” after I told him about “the glove,” he paused for a moment, and offered a new take.
A former colleague once told him the story of how his father once gave him a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, who’d given the ball to him during the 1935 season, when Ruth played for the Boston Braves.
And what did the youngster do with it?
“They knocked the cover off the ball, and as the strings tattered, the ball was no longer usable,” Price recalled.
Price’s friend would later lament the destruction of the one-of-a-kind ball. But years later, Price’s friend realized something: “It was the best tribute to the ball and to Babe Ruth. Because what better tribute to Ruth that the kids played with the ball.”
“The kids used it to fall in love with the game.”
As Denise Sandoval, professor of Chicano/Chicana students at CSUN, and an expert in L.A.’s cultural history told me, Fernando was a “game-changer” for the game and in the region’s cultural history.
For many Latinos, it was about “taking pride in somebody that looked like me, and like my family members, and who was unabashedly proud of his Mexican-ness.”
All these years later, oh, how I wish I would have appreciated Fernando so much more in his prime.
But when I go catch games now, I will pay homage to No. 34, with belated respect for an L.A. icon who inspired millions — including my mom.
And I’ll still be keeping my eyes open for a foul ball.
Source: Orange County Register
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