Fernando Valenzuela, Pitcher Whose Screwballs Eluded Batters, Dies at 63
The Los Angeles Dodgers star won the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards in 1981, when “Fernandomania” made him a household name and filled ballparks.
Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican-born left-handed Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who enthralled baseball fans as a 20-year-old in the 1981 season with a quirky windup that produced his signature screwball, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 63.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed in statements by the Dodgers and by Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred. The statements did not cite a cause.
Valenzuela stepped away from his job as a Dodgers broadcaster this month to focus on his health. The team said he had been planning to return for the 2025 season.
Valenzuela won his first eight starts in 1981 in spectacular fashion: Five of his victories were shutouts, and seven were complete games. His earned run average was a minuscule 0.50.
Advertisement
“He’s Got the World on a String — And It’s 8-0,” a headline in The Los Angeles Times read.
Valenzuela was somewhat more hittable during the rest of the season, which was broken up by a nearly two-month-long players’ strike. But his 13-7 record and 2.48 E.R.A. for the season were enough for him to win the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards. He was the only player ever to win both in the same year.
He continued to succeed in the 1981 postseason, with a record of 3-1, including a complete game victory in Game 3 of the World Series against the Yankees. Although he did not pitch his best in that game — he gave up nine hits and seven walks and threw 146 pitches — Valenzuela helped the Dodgers turn the tide against the Yankees, who had won the first two games. The Dodgers won the next three games to take the Series.
When Valenzuela started his windup, he lifted his arms over his head and, as he lowered them to meet his high-kicking right leg, he looked up to the sky. His eyes seemed to roll back in his head, as if in some sort of rapture.
Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ announcer who over 67 seasons watched Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Newcombe pitch, told The Los Angeles Times in 1991 that there was something different about games pitched by Valenzuela a decade earlier.
Advertisement
“Fernandomania bordered on a religious experience,” he said. “Fernando being Mexican, coming from nowhere, it was as though Mexicans grabbed onto him with both hands to ride to the moon.”
Tommy Lasorda, the Dodgers’ manager, told The New York Times columnist George Vecsey early in the 1981 season that Valenzuela was “one of the most impressive young pitchers I have ever seen.” He added, “I can’t compare his statistics or his repertoire to anybody.”
Valenzuela’s spectacular start ignited the “Fernandomania” phenomenon. His games filled Dodger Stadium and ballparks around the league. Merchandise sales rose, television ratings spiked, and media attention, from journalists in both the United States and Mexico, peaked. The headline on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s May 18 issue read, “Unreal!”
Valenzuela was also a guest at a White House luncheon hosted by President Ronald Reagan to honor President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico.
“Every Latin American country was represented when he pitched,” one of his teammates, the outfielder and future manager Dusty Baker, told mlb.com in 2021. “Not only Mexico, I’m talking El Salvador, Nicaragua. There’d be flags.”
Advertisement
Fernando Valenzuela was born on Nov. 11, 1960, in Navojoa, in northwestern Mexico near the Gulf of California, and grew up in Etchohuaquila, about 28 miles further northwest, where his parents, Avelino and Maria Valenzuela, had a small farm. Fernando played soccer as a boy, but he was better at baseball.
Valenzuela was discovered by accident in 1978 when Mike Brito, a Dodgers scout, was on a trip to Silao, in central Mexico, to watch a shortstop, Ali Uscanga, play in a Mexican rookie league game. His attention was diverted by the performance of Valenzuela, who struck out 12 batters for the team from Guanajuato, Silao’s opponent that day.
“I couldn’t believe he was only 17,” Brito later told Sports Illustrated.
The Dodgers signed Valenzuela the next year and sent him to the minor leagues, where he augmented his fastball and curveball with a screwball he learned from Bobby Castillo, one of the team’s pitchers. Valenzuela caught on quickly.
A screwball requires a left-hander like Valenzuela to snap his wrist in the opposite direction of other breaking balls so that it fades away from a right-handed batter.
“It’s an unnatural pitch, just the opposite of the curve,” Carl Hubbell, one of the screwball’s greatest practitioners, who pitched for the New York Giants from 1928 to 1943, told The Los Angeles Times in 1981. Valenzuela’s screwball, he added, was “the best since mine.”
Advertisement
The pitch has been so rarely mastered that Tyler Kepner, the former national baseball writer for The New York Times, who is now with The Athletic, described it as the “Sasquatch of baseball” in his 2019 book, “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches.”
After one full season in the Dodgers’ minor league system, with the San Antonio Double A team (where his record was 13-9 with a 3.10 E.R.A.), Valenzuela was called up by the parent club late in the 1980 season. In 10 games, all as a reliever, he surrendered no earned runs while winning two games and losing none.
Following his sensational rookie season in 1981, he pitched for the Dodgers through 1990. He finished third in Cy Young voting in 1982, when he had a record of 19-13, with a 2.47 E.R.A.; won 21 games in 1986, the most in his career; and pitched a no-hitter on June 29, 1990, against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“If you have a sombrero,” Scully said after the final out, “throw it to the sky!”
A no-hitter was a surprise at that point in Valenzuela’s career. He had been struggling during the season and had surrendered eight earned runs in his previous start. And he was tiring in the final three innings.
Advertisement
“This kind of tired didn’t bother me,” he told reporters afterward. “You think I feel anything during those last inning? No way.”
He completed that season with a 13-13 record and a 4.59 E.R.A., the highest of his career until then, and was released by the Dodgers early the next year on the day his $2.55 million contract (equivalent to about $6 million today) would have been guaranteed.
Over the next seven seasons, he tried unsuccessfully to recapture his past success. He pitched for the California (now Los Angeles) Angels and for a team in the Mexican Baseball League, then returned to the majors with the Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres and Cardinals, who released him in July 1997, a month after they acquired him from the Padres.
His 2-12 record brought an end to his major league career, but he continued to pitch into his 40s for a few years in the Mexican winter league.
In all, his career record was 173-153, with a 3.54 E.R.A. He was chosen for six All-Star Games, including the one he started in 1981, his rookie season. The Dodgers retired his No. 34 in 2023.
Advertisement
The Dodgers and Major League Baseball announced on Thursday that they would pay tribute to Valenzuela before Game One of the World Series on Friday in Los Angeles by observing a moment of silence, and that all Dodger players would wear a “34” patch on their uniforms for the entire Series.
His survivors include his wife, Linda; four children, Fernando Jr., Ricardo, Linda and Maria Fernanda; and seven grandchildren.
Valenzuela returned to the Dodgers in 2003 as an analyst for its Spanish-language radio broadcasts, and he remained beloved by fans.
“When I was playing, I was scared to talk,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. “It was not my first choice to be in front of the microphone. But now, I kind of like it.”
