Everybody wants to have a hero | ‘Fernandomania @ 40’ Ep. 1

The Dodgers always seemed to know before anyone else that baseball was meant as a multicultural game. While in Brooklyn, the team shattered Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 with the arrival of Jackie Robinson. And in the 1960s, Sandy Koufax captured the imagination of L.A.’s Jewish community. Yet, for more than two decades, the Dodgers lacked a star to whom the city’s large Mexican and Mexican American communities could relate.

That all changed in 1981, when Fernando Valenzuela took the mound on opening day, throwing a five-hit shutout against the Houston Astros en route to an 8-0 start to the season. The 20-year-old rookie left-hander from the small town of Etchohuaquila, Mexico, became a sensation for his baseball prowess and his quirks — the hair, the windup, the screwball. More importantly, he inspired a local Latino community, many of whom had never rooted for the team. Finally, they had a hero who looked just like them. It was called Fernandomania, and it reverberated both inside Dodger Stadium on the nights Valenzuela pitched and all over Los Angeles.

This opening episode of the multipart “Fernandomania @ 40” offers an overview of the series, which will reveal Valenzuela’s influence and legacy — as an athlete who opened doors for ballplayers around the globe and how he almost single-handedly helped mend the team’s frosty relationship with those who had never forgotten that the team built its stadium on land that had been vacated by primarily Latino families in Chavez Ravine in the 1950s.