UPDATE: Well, I seemed to have gotten the lede right yesterday! Freddie Freeman hits the first grand slam walkoff in World Series history, a two-out, tenth inning no doubter that cemented the game’s status as an instant classic. All played crisply (except for a few defensive miscues) in front of a packed and raucous Dodger Stadium crowd. I’ll be back tonight for more!
Tonight begins what could be a classic World Series. With the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers we have two of the game’s most storied and successful franchises. In Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, we have the two presumptive league MVPs facing each other for the first time in the World Series since 2012, when Buster Posey’s Giants beat Miguel Cabrera’s Tigers.
Here’s Joe Posnanski’s take.
“(O)ne year after the least irresistible World Series matchup ever, baseball got the ultimate television matchup. Here you go, America—it’s the Dodgers and the Yankees, it’s Shohei and Aaron Judge, it’s Juan Soto and Mookie Betts, it’s baseball royalty against baseball royalty, it’s probably the two most beloved and most despised teams in the sport going at it in the World Series for the first time since 1981, when the Yanks had Reggie and the Dodgers had Fernando and the Yankees had Winfield and the Dodgers had Garvey, and half of all television watchers in the U.S. tuned in.”
Joe’s mention of Fernando and 1981 is an especially poignant reminder this week that time marches on.
Fernando Valenzuela, R.I.P.
Fernando is, of course, Fernando Valenzuela, the great Mexican pitcher with the unhittable screwball and everyman physique who died on Tuesday at the age of 63. Few players had a better start to a big-league career than Fernando’s 8-0 winning streak to begin 1981, a stretch of complete games that included five shutouts. In his first eight starts that year, Valenzuela went 8-0 with a 0.50 E.R.A.
More importantly, he pitched with joy and he brought that joy to millions of fans.
When Valenzuela took the mound, Fernandomania took over Dodger stadium. His chubby midsection, cherubic face, and long hair gave him a look that non-athletes could appreciate. Frankly, was anyone better suited than Fernando for John Kruk’s famous quip?
“It was spring training, and John Kruk was significantly overweight.
He was also drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A woman recognized him, and she approached him. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re an athlete,’ she said.
Kruk responded, ‘I ain’t an athlete, lady. I’m a baseball player.’”
Fernando didn’t look like an athlete, but he was a helluva baseball player. Not only could he pitch, but he could hit, and his spot in the batting order was never a sure out.
Oh, and women loved him.
No player reshaped his franchise’s fanbase in quite the way that the 20-year-old Valenzuela did when it seems the entire Mexican population of Southern California became Dodger fans. And that was a hard sell, because Dodger Stadium had been built on top of a thriving Mexican-American neighborhood, Chávez Ravine. Ry Cooder captured the demise of their hometown in the song 3rd Base, Dodger Stadium.
“Back around the 76 ball, Johnny Greeneyes had his shoeshine stall | In the middle of the 1st base line, got my first kiss, Florencia was kind | Now, if the dozer hadn’t taken my yard, you’d see the tree with our initials carved | So many moments in my memory. Sure was fun, ’cause the game was free | It was free”
But in those pre-internet days, it took only a few games for Fernandomania to take hold. Posnanski writes about the shift as seen by the Dodgers’ Spanish-language announcer.
“Jaime Jarrín, who had been calling Dodgers games in Spanish since 1959, thought the crowd looked fundamentally different from any he’d ever seen at a big-league game. This was a crowd filled with women, a crowd filled with Latino fans, so many of them Mexican.
‘People from Mexico,’ he said, ‘people from other Latin American countries like Ecuador, where I’m from, we didn’t have many baseball idols.… He opened up the sport for us. People who had spent all their lives thinking only about fútbol, Fernando gave them a reason to care about the greatest game, to care about baseball.’”
Fernando was a phenomenon, and I was lucky enough to see him pitch in that magical year of 1981. Surprisingly, he actually lost that game in May at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to an aging Gaylord Perry. It was only his second loss of the year. As the wire reports from that game noted,
“Valenzuela (8-2) lasted only 3 2/3 innings and was charged with seven earned runs, lifting his earned run average from 1.24 to 1.88. It was the first time this season that Valenzuela failed to pitch at least seven innings and was his second straight defeat.”
Braves fan that I was at the time, I was glad to see Atlanta come through. But I was more excited to have had the chance to see Fernando, even if it was a rare off night in a magical season. He righted the ship, of course, and helped lead Los Angeles to that iconic 1981 World Championship. He won the National League’s Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards that year. To this day, no one else in the majors has won those honors in the same season.
Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ longtime Hall of Fame broadcaster, once described Fernandomania as bordering on a “religious experience.”
Posnanski, as he often does, says it best for the fan in all of us:
“I honestly believe that Fernando Valenzuela, inning for inning, brought more glee, more laughter, more euphoria, more bliss and more happy feelings than any player in baseball history. To watch him pitch was to smile. The watch him hit was to feel a little more alive. To see him unwind his body as only he did—always pausing for an instant to look up to the sky as if he were asking God: ‘Are you watching this?’—and then uncork that magnificent screwball that had a mind of its own and to watch hitters helpless against its power, all of it took all of us one step closer to heaven.”
Rest in peace, Fernando, and thanks for the great memories.
As for the World Series, I don’t really have a dog in this hunt, but I’m excited to see the stars involved nonetheless. As a longtime Willie Mays and Giants fan, I really don’t like the Dodgers. And like any normal baseball fan who doesn’t live within two hours of New York City, I really don’t like the Yankees. But I adore Juan Soto and Freddie Freeman. I think Aaron Judge is unreal and Shohei is from another baseball planet and I love watching both of them play. As if we didn’t need any more excitement, Chelsea James, writing in the Washington Post, has teased us with the prospect of Shohei pitching to Judge in Game 7. I don’t think it will happen, and Dave Roberts has said it absolutely will not happen, but if anyone could do it, he could. *
So I have no predictions. I just want tight, well-played games where the stars shine and some obscure player makes us all shake our head and remember why we love baseball so much.
And since it is almost Saturday, let’s listen to some great songs about baseball . . . something you’ll never get with football and basketball.
We’ll begin with Les Brown and His Orchestra’s Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. “They don’t make ditties like they used to,” writes Andy McCullough. “This right here is a ditty.” The lyrics tell the tale of Joe DiMaggio’s famous 56-game hitting streak.
Rusin Dodd, in the New York Times, wrote, “I once saw a Springsteen concert in Phoenix during spring training and ended up sitting about 10 feet from a veteran major leaguer. He was there with family and stayed rather reserved the whole night, but when ‘The Boss’ started playing ‘Glory Days,’ they all went nuts.”
I loved Steve Goodman, as he was an everyman folksinger. When the Cubbies came back to stay alive in the 2016 World Series by winning Game 5, Wrigley Field burst into communal singing with his Go Cubs Go. It pairs nicely with Goodman playing A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request.
McCullough noted that “(t)here is something soothing about hearing Claude and Cliff Trenier opine about ‘The Say Hey Kid’ running the bases like a choo-choo train and making the turn around second like an aeroplane. I couldn’t agree more. I miss Willie Mays.
I think John Fogerty’s Centerfield belongs on any list of great baseball songs. All you have to do is be at a ballpark and watch people sing along when it is played to know how much it connects. “Put me in coach” indeed!
And finally, there’s the classic Take Me Out to the Ballgame, sung here—as it will be tonight—by a packed Dodger stadium crowd.
Play ball!
More to come . . .
DJB
*I haven’t been to either Dodger Stadium or Yankee Stadium in my quest to visit all MLB ballparks . . . but Claire has! Here she is almost 10 years ago, with friends enjoying a game a Chávez Ravine. Maybe it is time that Claire and I go on a baseball road trip next summer!
World Series Commissioners trophy image from Britannica
MORE TO COME... 
Pingback: Observations from . . . October 2024 | MORE TO COME...