Fernando Valenzuela, the pitcher whose screwball eluded batters, dies at 63

Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican-born, left-handed pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers who captivated baseball fans as a 20-year-old during the 1981 season with a strange windup that produced his signature screwball, died Tuesday. He was 63 years old.

Dodgers and Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr.'s statement confirmed his death. No cause of death was reported. The team said Valenzuela stepped down from his job as a Dodgers broadcaster earlier this month to focus on his health and planned to return for the 2025 season.

Valenzuela won his first eight starts in spectacular fashion: five of his wins were shutouts, and seven were complete games. His earned run average was a minuscule 0.50.

“He's Got the World on a String – And It's 8-0,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Valenzuela deserved a little more hitting for the rest of the season, which was interrupted by a nearly two-month players' strike. His 13-7 record and 2.48 ERA on the season were enough to win him the National League Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award, the only player to win both in the same year.

He continued to have success in the 1981 postseason with a 3–1 record, including a complete game victory in Game 3 of the World Series against the Yankees. Although he didn't pitch at his best — he gave up nine hits and seven walks and threw 146 pitches — Valenzuela helped the Dodgers turn the tide against the Yankees, who won the first two games. The Dodgers won the next three games to take the series.

As Valenzuela begins his armbar, he lifts his arms above his head and as he lowers them to meet his high kicking right leg, he looks up at the sky. His eyes seem to be rolling back in his head, as if in a sort of delirium.

Dodgers announcer Vin Scully, who watched Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Newcomb pitch over 67 seasons, told the Los Angeles Times in 1991 that something was different about Valenzuela's games a decade earlier.

“Fernandomania borders on a religious experience,” he said. “Fernando is Mexican, coming from nowhere, as if the Mexicans grabbed him with both hands to ride on the moon.”

“He's one of the most impressive young pitchers I've ever seen,” Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda told The New York Times columnist George Vecchi at the start of the 1981 season. “I can't compare his stats or his collection to anyone.”

Valenzuela's spectacular start ignited the “Fernandomania” phenomenon. His games fill Dodger Stadium and ballparks around the league. Product sales are up, television ratings are up and media attention, from US and Mexican journalists, is peaking. The headline in the May 18 issue of Sports Illustrated read, “Unreal!”

Valenzuela was also a guest at a White House luncheon hosted by President Reagan to honor Mexican President José López Portillo.

“Every Latin American country was represented when he pitched,” one of his teammates, outfielder and future manager Dusty Baker, told mlb.com in 2021. “Not just Mexico, I'm talking about El Salvador, Nicaragua. There will be flags.”

Fernando Valenzuela was born on November 11, 1960, in Navojoa, Mexico, and grew up in Ichohuaquila, where his parents, Avelino and Maria Valenzuela, owned a small farm. Fernando played soccer as a boy, but he was good at baseball.

Valenzuela was discovered by accident in 1978 when Mike Brito, a Dodgers scout, was on a trip to Silao, 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 Silao's opponent Guanajuato that day.

“I couldn't believe he was only 17,” Brito later told Sports Illustrated.

The Dodgers signed Valenzuela the following year and sent him to the minor leagues, where he enhanced 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 flick his wrist to the opposite side of another breaking ball so that it fades away from the right-handed batter.

“It's an unnatural pitch, just the opposite of the curve,” Carl Hubbell, one of the greatest screwball practitioners with the New York Giants, told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Valenzuela's screwball, he added, “was the best of mine.”

The pitch has been so rarely mastered that Tyler Kepner, a former national baseball writer for The New York Times who is now with The Athletic, described it as “Baseball's Sasquatch” in his 2018 book “K: A History of Baseball” at ten pitches. “

In the Dodgers' minor league system with the San Antonio Double A team (where his record was 13–9 with a 3.10 ERA), Valenzuela was called up by the parent club. In 10 games, all as a reliever, he surrendered no earned runs and won two of his decisions.

After his sensational rookie season in 1981, he was with the Dodgers by 1990. He finished third in Cy Young voting in 1982, when he posted a 19-13 record with a 2.47 ERA, won 21 games in 1986, his career-high, and pitched a no-hitter on June 29, 1990 against the St. Louis Cardinals. .

“If you have a sombrero,” Scully said after the finale, “throw it in the sky!”

A no-hitter at that point in Valenzuela's career was a surprise. He struggled during the season and surrendered eight earned runs in his previous start. And he was tired in the last three innings.

“That kind of fatigue didn't bother me,” he later told reporters. “Do you think I felt anything in the last innings? No way.”

He finished that season with a 13–13 record and a 4.59 ERA, the highest of his career, and was released by the Dodgers early the following year when his $2.55 million contract was guaranteed.

Over the next seven seasons, he tried unsuccessfully to recapture his past success. He pitched for the California (now Los Angeles) Angels and 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, after one month. He was later traded there by the Padres.

His 2–12 record ended his major league career, but he continued to pitch into his 40s for several years in the Mexican Winter League.

In all, his career record was 173-153, with a 3.54 ERA. He was selected to six All-Star games, including one he started in 1981, his rookie season. The Dodgers retired his number 34 in 2023.

His survivors include his wife, Linda; four children, Fernando Jr., Ricardo, Linda and Maria Fernanda; and seven grandchildren, according to Major League Baseball.

Valenzuela returned to the Dodgers in 2003 as an analyst for Spanish-language radio broadcasts and was a fan favorite.

“When I was playing, I was afraid to speak,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “Being in front of the microphone was not my first choice. But now, I love it.”

John Yoon Contribution reporting.