The Dodgers Finally Call Fernando Valenzuela’s Number

LOS ANGELES — In an honor that was decades overdue, the Dodgers finally retired Fernando Valenzuela’s number 34 on Friday night at Dodger Stadium. The festivities kicked off Fernandomania Weekend, a three-day celebration of the transcendent superstar’s impact on the franchise, first as a pitcher during his initial 11-season run (1980–90) and then as an analyst on the team’s Spanish-language broadcasts (2003–present). Beyond starring on the field by winning NL Rookie of the Year and Cy Young honors and helping the Dodgers capture a world championship in 1981, Valenzuela emerged as an international cultural icon. He brought generations of Mexican-American and Latino fans to baseball and helped to heal the wounds caused by the building of the very ballpark in which he starred.

Valenzuela’s rise is something of a fairy tale. The youngest of 12 children in a family in Etchohuaquila, Mexico (pop. 150), he was discovered by Dodgers superscout Mike Brito at age 17 and signed the next year (1979). Taught to throw a screwball by Dodgers reliever Bobby Castillo during the 1979 Arizona Instructional League, he went on a dominant run at Double-A San Antonio the following year and was called up to the Dodgers in mid-September. The pudgy and mysterious 19-year-old southpaw spun 17.2 innings of brilliant relief work without allowing an earned run during the heat of a pennant race. He made the team as a starter the following spring, and his career took off when he tossed an Opening Day shutout against the Astros in an emergency start, filling in for an injured Jerry Reuss. He kept putting up zeroes, going 8–0 with seven complete games, five shutouts, and a 0.50 ERA in 72 innings over his first eight starts, drawing outsized crowds in every city where he pitched. Despite speaking barely a word of English, he became an instant celebrity on the strength of a bashful smile, preternatural poise, and impeccable command of his signature pitch, delivered with a distinctive motion that included a skyward gaze at the peak of his windup.

To borrow a metaphor from Erik Sherman, author of the new biography Daybreak at Chavez Ravine, Valenzuela was baseball’s version of the Beatles, a composite of the Fab Four with a universal appeal. He landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated less than two months into his rookie season, an unprecedented event in the magazine’s history. Fernandomania took hold of baseball and survived that summer’s seven-week player strike. In October, the rookie displayed incredible guile, winning two elimination games and preventing the Yankees from taking a 3–0 series lead in the World Series. His Herculean 149-pitch effort in Game 3 turned the tide, helping the Dodgers capture their first championship since 1965. He would play a vital part on two more NL West-winning Dodgers teams and make six All-Star teams before leaving the fold and making stops with half a dozen other major league teams, though he never matched his success in L.A.

On Friday night, a crowd of 49,315 fans, many of them wearing replicas of Valenzuela’s Dodgers and Team Mexico jerseys, showed up early to pay tribute to the beloved pitcher. U.S. senator Alex Padilla, the first Hispanic senator from California; team president and CEO Stan Kasten; retired Dodgers broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, who served as his interpreter during Fernandomania; and former battery-mate Mike Scioscia spoke about Valenzuela’s impact upon the team, the city, and a fan base that expanded radically as it supported him. Sandy Koufax, Julio Urías, and broadcaster Pepe Yñiguez joined them onstage, with broadcaster Charley Steiner serving as master of ceremonies. A mariachi band accompanied a beaming Valenzuela’s walk to the stage. Afterwards, former teammates Orel Hershiser and Manny Mota unveiled the number 34 on the Dodgers Ring of Honor.

Kasten recounted his own arrival as the Dodgers president and CEO in 11 years ago. “My first night here, as I walked through the stands and met the fans, talked to the fans, observed the fans, and listened to the fans, I realized there was a name that equaled any other player in the hearts and minds of fans, and that was Fernando Valenzuela. It was then that I understood Fernandomania wasn’t just in 1981, Fernandomania never has ended. It’s still going on today, which is what brings us here tonight.”

It was Kasten who informed Valenzuela in February that the team would finally retire his number, doing so under the guise of recording a promotional video. “Three days before FanFest, that’s when they told me first I have to record some tape for the Dodgers, for the community,” Valenzuela said in a pregame press conference. “Then [Kasten] said, “We’re going to retire your number.’ I said, ‘Really?’ It caught me by surprise.”

The soft-spoken Valenzuela is understandably less comfortable speaking English than Spanish, and even more uneasy being the center of attention no matter the language. Asked by a Spanish-speaking reporter if he was nervous about the festivities, he responded, “Honestly? I would rather have the bases loaded with no outs.” His 20-minute presser was largely conducted in his native tongue, without Jarrín or anyone else serving as an interpreter, yet just like those bases-loaded situations, he kept his cool and rose to the occasion.

“It’s very emotional, really,” Valenzuela told reporters. “I’ve never been in this kind of situation, but to be part of the Dodgers for many years, now they’re going to do something with the number, I think that’s the best.”

Valenzuela’s number had been out of circulation since the team released the pitcher in the spring of 1991 after years of declining effectiveness due to overuse, offset by the occasional highlight, such as his June 29, 1990 no-hitter. Longtime clubhouse manager Mitch Poole declined to issue no. 34 to another player even while the organization adhered to a longstanding policy — one dating back to the days when Walter O’Malley owned the team — of retiring only the numbers of those elected to the Hall of Fame as Dodgers. Only one of the team’s 11 retired numbers deviated from that policy: when former Rookie of the Year, All-Star, and coach Jim Gilliam died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 49 on October 8, 1978, the Dodgers retired his no. 19 two days later, when the World Series opened in Los Angeles.

With his career stunted by injuries, Valenzuela’s shot at the Hall of Fame came and went; he received just 6.2% on the 2003 BBWAA ballot and 3.8% on the ’04 one, ruling him out from further consideration by the writers. But while the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot rules may be inflexible, team rules aren’t engraved on stone tablets. The only thing stopping the Dodgers from retiring the number was, well, the Dodgers, and given his position, Kasten probably had more power to right the wrong than anyone. While the team inducted Valenzuela into its Legends of Dodger Baseball group — honoring those who left their marks but weren’t in the Hall — in 2019, it let the 30th and 40th anniversaries of Fernandomania pass without adding 34 to the Dodgers Ring of Honor. Meanwhile, key figures in Valenzuela’s rags-to-riches story passed away, including Castillo in 2014; Tommy Lasorda, his longtime manager, in 2021; and Brito in 2022. In response to the persistent questions from fans, as Kasten said in February, the Dodgers reviewed their policy and decided it was time for a change.

Though surprised in the moment when he was told, Valenzuela did have an inkling this day would eventually come. “It means a lot because that number was there, open. Nobody used it,” he told reporters. “I don’t know if that decision [was] from the clubhouse manager, or [above]. Surprised me because it’s not too high a number, not 76, not 77, so… I said, ‘Something’s cooking, something’s happening.'”

Indeed, something did happen, and when the big night arrived, this scribe was lucky enough to see it all go down — from multiple perspectives, both literally and figuratively.

As an 11-year-old Dodgers fan in 1981, I was enthralled by Valenzuela. I clipped the box scores of that eight-start run from the Salt Lake Tribune and taped them to a sheet of notebook paper in a three-ring binder. On another sheet, I kept a running stat line that helped me to calculate his minuscule ERA without waiting for the Sunday papers (need I remind there was no Baseball Reference or FanGraphs in those days?). I had been living and dying with the Dodgers since 1978 and understood Valenzuela to be the equalizer who would help avenge the team’s back-to-back losses to the Yankees in the World Series in ’77 and ’78. He quickly overtook the other favorite players in my personal pantheon. Unfortunately, by averaging 264 regular-season and postseason innings from 1981 to ’87, he wound up an injured bystander by the time the Dodgers won another World Series in ’88, another great arm sacrificed at the altar of Lasorda. But in that magical rookie year, he more than lived up to the faith that I placed in him. The flag he planted in my heart flies forever.

And so, having spent more than a decade using my platform to advocate for the Dodgers to retire Valenzuela’s number, I lucked into a scheduling coincidence, with the date of the festivities preceding a planned family vacation in San Diego by just one day. The math worked out, and the stars aligned. I was not only credentialed to cover the festivities and get a glimpse behind the scenes but was also invited as a ticketed guest, joining longtime Dodger Thoughts blogger and author Jon Weisman and his siblings to view the ceremony and the ensuing Dodgers-Rockies game from the upper deck behind home plate.

Before joining the Weisman crew, I got to hear manager Dave Roberts offer his view of Valenzuela’s significance to the franchise, to attend the aforementioned press conference, and to see parts of Dodger Stadium that I’d never seen, some of them with an assist from the Orange County-Register’s J.P. Hoornstra, who volunteered to serve as my tour guide (thanks, J.P.!). Since I’d never worked a game at Dodger Stadium before, it was almost overwhelming to set foot in the Vin Scully Press Box for the first time; I’ll admit I needed a moment there to collect myself before going about my business.

After the perfunctory trips to the team clubhouse and the dugout (to hear Roberts), we wandered through the media cafeteria — where the man of the night sat, receiving well-wishes from familiar faces — and then onto the displays of MVP, Cy Young, and Gold Glove awards, as well as old posters, artwork, signage and memorabilia dating back to the team’s days in Brooklyn. The one that stopped me in my tracks was the display of the retired numbers, complete with the new addition:

The Dodgers’ retired numbers wall pic.twitter.com/k0uUqer4uJ

— Jay Jaffe (@jay_jaffe) August 11, 2023

There’s no cheering in the press box, however, and no replica no. 34 jerseys allowed either, so it was with great anticipation that I ascended to the top deck of the ballpark, changed costume, bought a couple of Dodger Dogs and a beer, and let myself be a fan for a few hours. It was pure joy (thanks, Jon!).

…

It’s a moot point as far as the jersey retirement goes, but as for Valenzuela in Cooperstown, I get asked about it almost as often as Kasten might have been asked about number 34. I’ve said before that if there were a case to be mounted, I’d be all over it. The foremost problem is that Hall of Fame voters — both writers and the various small committees over the years — have not done well when grappling with the type of hybrid case that Valenzuela presents, one that goes so far beyond the numbers. They may do it reasonably well for executives, managers, and umpires, but the template for players who’ve added something extra with their contributions isn’t a clear one.

For Valenzuela, the numbers themselves are not sufficient. Despite his six All-Star appearances, Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards, and trio of top-three finishes in the voting for the latter, he finished his career with just a 173–153 record, a 3.54 ERA (104 ERA+), and 2,074 strikeouts, none of which read as Hall-caliber. Even with five league top-10 finishes in bWAR, neither his 41.4 bWAR or 36.5 S-JAWS register as Hallworthy either; by the latter, he ranks 171st all-time, eight spots below Jack Morris and ahead of only Lefty Gomez, Catfish Hunter, Rube Marquard, and Jesse Haines among non-Negro Leagues Hall of Fame pitchers. His postseason line (5–1, 1.98 ERA in 63.2 innings) elevates his case, but it’s not enough to bridge the divide as far as Hall standards are concerned. It’s hardly a wonder that he barely made a dent in the writers’ ballot; even in my own analysis, using JAWS before it was called JAWS nearly 20 years ago, I gave him just one paragraph in that context.

The case for Valenzuela rests upon his status as a trailblazer and ambassador on top of his 1980–86 burst. “A strong argument can be made that he introduced baseball to more people around the world than any ballplayer who has ever lived,” wrote Sherman in Daybreak. “In the years since [his arrival], nobody has transformed baseball’s landscape more than Valenzuela, whose presence was as sport-altering as Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson were in their day.”

While I’m not quite convinced Valenzuela belongs at the level of Ruth and Robinson, his impact upon Los Angeles and throughout Latin America was huge. His arrival and subsequent success helped to unite L.A., a racially divided city not only scarred by the Battle of Chavez Ravine — the decade-long effort to repossess the land and evict nearly 2,000 Mexican-American families for the building of Dodger Stadium — but also by the ensuing decades of mistreatment and prejudice against Mexican-Americans. Circa 1959, when the Dodgers were still playing at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Dodger Stadium was being built, only eight percent of the crowds were Latino, according to Jarrín, who served as the Dodgers’ Spanish-language voice from that season to 2022 and who won the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters in 1998. By 2019, that figure was up around 46 percent, the legacy of the inroads made by Valenzuela’s run with the team.

“Roberto Clemente is ‘The Great One,’ but culturally, Fernando Valenzuela has been more significant in terms of bringing a fan base that didn’t exist in baseball,” José de Jesus Ortiz, the first Latino president of the BBWAA, told Sherman for Daybreak. When the announcement of Valenzuela’s jersey retirement was made in February, Ortiz, who grew up in Los Angeles, wrote:

He lured our soccer-loving Mexican immigrant parents to Dodger Stadium or other National League stadiums. In many ways, the rookie from Etchohuaquila, Sonora, Mexico, lifted Mexicans out of the shadows. Before Valenzuela, most Americans assumed Mexicans were mainly in the Southwest and California. Throughout that 1981 season, however, Valenzuela lured thousands of Mexican fans to each of his starts on the road.

If you didn’t know there were large pockets of Mexicans in New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Philadelphia or any other NL city in 1981, you found out quickly when Valenzuela pitched in those cities.

“He inspired so many kids throughout Latin America that might have had doubts about themselves,” José Mota (Manny’s son, and a Spanish-language broadcaster for the Dodgers) told Sherman. “What people noticed was this humble kid that didn’t look like a baseball specimen, so they believed if he could succeed, they could to. In Mexico, if they have enough talent, they’ll be given a chance now because of Fernando. The same holds true not just in my country, the Dominican Republic… but also in other places, like Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Fernando was not Mexican for us — he was just a Latino guy. He had a plethora of countries that identified with him and considered him as one of [their own].”

Valenzuela’s case for election to the Hall now falls under the purview of the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, for players who made their greatest impact from 1980 onward. To be included on the next eight-man ballot (2026), he will be competing for space with the candidates who fell short when Fred McGriff was elected on the 2023 ballot, such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy, not to mention Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker, whom the Historical Overview Committee that built the ballot failed to include. Next time around, the logjam could also include Jeff Kent, whose 10-year run on the writers’ ballot just ended, and Gary Sheffield, who’s headed into his final year of eligibility.

Note that the Historical Overview Committee consists of senior BBWAA members, which is to say a subset of the voting body that rejected Valenzuela two decades ago. In building the ballot, they tend to favor candidates who received substantial BBWAA support instead of those who slipped through the cracks. That stacks the deck against Valenzuela even before considering the unique shape of his candidacy.

A sobering example of how an Era Committee might treat Valenzuela as a candidate with a not-quite-Hall-caliber peak as a player followed by a long tail as an ambassador can be found in the case of Lefty O’Doul. His heyday as a player was brief; after transitioning from pitching, he was a regular for just six of his 11 seasons in the majors during the 1919–34 span, winning two batting titles and finishing with a .349 batting average, the highest of any player outside the Hall, albeit from a very hitter-friendly era. O’Doul made a much greater impact as a pioneer by teaching baseball fundamentals to Japanese players and serving as a goodwill ambassador to the country both before and after World War II. Per the research of Graham Womack, he was considered at least 11 times by the Veterans Committee between 1963 and ’85 without being elected. He then received just 18.2% via the expanded VC in 2007 and 31.3% via the 2022 Early Baseball Era Committee balloting.

Buck O’Neil offers a more successful example of a hybrid candidacy… sort of. He was posthumously elected on that 2022 ballot for his own amalgam of credentials as a player and manager in the Negro Leagues, as a pioneering scout and coach for the integrated AL and NL, and as an ambassador for the bygone Negro Leagues. O’Neil played an outsized role in raising awareness of Black baseball and in recognizing its greats as a Veterans Committee member and through other avenues, including his narration in Ken Burns’ nine-part documentary series Baseball and his co-founding of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. His relationship to the Hall is tinged by heartbreak: he was bypassed by the 2006 Special Committee on the Negro Leagues, which elected 17 others, and died less than a year later. Not until that 2022 ballot were Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball candidates even considered again, at which point he finally gained entry.

The subject of O’Neil does illuminate one avenue to Cooperstown in the form of the Lifetime Achievement Award created in his name in 2008. According to the Hall’s website, the award “is presented by the Hall of Fame’s Board of Directors not more than once every three years to honor an individual whose extraordinary efforts enhanced baseball’s positive impact on society, broadened the game’s appeal, and whose character, integrity and dignity are comparable to the qualities exhibited by O’Neil.” This year’s award went to another Dodgers legend, Carl Erskine, who threw two no-hitters while pitching for five Brooklyn pennant winners and one champion during his 12-year career (1948–59). Spurred by the birth of a son with Down syndrome in 1960, Erskine became an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, most notably spending four decades volunteering for the Special Olympics.

The Buck O’Neil Award practically sounds as though it were created for Valenzuela, an honor that is well within his reach. It may not be a bronze plaque, but it is high-level recognition for long and meritorious service to the game in ways that aren’t necessarily easy to quantify or pigeonhole. Perhaps the Hall will recognize Valenzuela by this means at some point down the road. For now, we can take comfort in the Dodgers getting it right. While they may have retired the pitcher-turned-broadcaster’s number belatedly, thankfully he’s still around to enjoy the celebration. Fernandomania never has ended.