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…
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