Fernando Back on Top After an Uphill Climb : Baseball: Cast away by the Dodgers and ignored by other teams, the creator of Fernandomania is ready to test the mound in Anaheim. As always, his fans will be awaiting him.

On a humid afternoon with rain sounding like drumbeats atop the dugout roof, Fernando Valenzuela admitted he had suffered doubts.

For nearly two months he had waited at home for the phone to ring. And waited. And waited some more.

Yes, he said, the doubts had been there before the California Angels called in May. Not about himself, but about the ability of major league baseball teams to recognize that at age 30 he was still worth a million dollars a year to throw a baseball.

“I still believe in myself,” Valenzuela said. “I can still play.”

And so tonight, if all goes as scheduled, Valenzuela will bend others to his belief. Or he will confirm their worst fears. Before a roaring Anaheim Stadium crowd, the hefty left-hander will pitch against the Detroit Tigers for a new team in a new stadium before new fans.

The ballgame is a key step in his attempt to prove he’s not washed up, that he can still do the thing he loves--play ball. In the barrios and in the major leagues, his fans are pulling for him, hoping he can write another happy chapter in an improbable tale of success.

It will seem odd not to see him in the familiar Dodger blue, the number 34 stitched on his uniform back. In 1981, his first full major league season, he began with the impact of an earthquake, winning his first eight games. By year’s end he became the first rookie to win two of baseball’s most prestigious awards.

The athlete built more like Archie Bunker than Jose Canseco spawned a phenomenon known as “Fernandomania” and brought thousands of new fans into ballparks around the country--and now into the Big A.

For years, his picture was on billboards across Los Angeles. Balladeers sang the tale of this Mexican farm kid in Spanish and English. He was pudgy, he was shy. He looked to the heavens as he delivered a pitch, he grimaced and he lighted the night with his smile when he won.

In all, he pitched more than 10 years with the Dodgers, but the final seasons were less kind: fewer victories, less skill, diminished value to the team.

Last March the Dodgers bade Valenzuela goodby. He hoped another team would sign him immediately. But as the weeks went by without offers, he told himself that if he didn’t play this year he’d wait until next year. There would be a silver lining: The rest would let his arm regain strength.

Sitting in a dugout in Mississippi, he admitted that those kind of thoughts deny reality. If teams wonder about his 30-year-old arm, they’d wonder more about his 31-year-old arm. New pitchers would enter the majors as they do each year, pushing the older ones out. There would be new fan favorites, and eventually Valenzuela would become part of the “Where are they now?” quizzes.

Even when the Angels made him an offer he couldn’t refuse--the only offer--it wasn’t to simply show up in Anaheim and pitch. First came a week-and-a-half odyssey through the minor leagues to Palm Springs, Jackson, Miss., and finally to Little Rock, Ark., giving the Angels a chance to see what they were buying.

Valenzuela’s first start in the minors was Palm Springs and he didn’t look too good. Then came Jackson, and he looked better.

On the afternoon after his start in Jackson he tried to beat the Mississippi rain; he ran along a hard dirt track a few feet wide between the fence and the grass in the outfield, loping from left field to right, turning, running from right field to left, turning again for yet another lap.

He wore a white bandanna around his forehead, soaking up the sweat. Although a teammate ran with him, it was lonely, grinding stuff, out of sight of the fans, just a mega-bucks craftsman getting his tools ready.

Even when the rain started coming down hard, Valenzuela kept it up. Finally a sudden tropical squall up from the Gulf of Mexico sent the rain down in torrents, soaking his gray sweat pants and shirt, forcing him to stop running and take refuge in the dugout.

As he tapped his foot nervously, he talked about his efforts to stay in shape this spring so he’d be ready to pitch again in the majors. Every fifth day, he would round up two friends and drive to a park not far from his home. There, one friend would catch Valenzuela’s pitches; the other would stand with a bat in his hand, impersonating a batter in a “simulated game.”

But Valenzuela knew that wasn’t really baseball, just a way of staying in shape. And he knows that his increasingly better performances in the minors don’t guarantee success in the big leagues. He recognizes there’s a big jump between the minors and the majors, between riding a bus for five hours in the post-midnight darkness from Jackson to Little Rock and flying on airplanes for a major league team; between facing batters who will never be good enough to get to where he’d been and looking at batters who have proved they belong with the best in baseball.

And if he didn’t recognize the daunting challenges ahead, his new bosses in Anaheim had sent along Angel scout Preston Gomez to remind him.

Part confidante, part scold, Gomez stayed in the same hotels as Valenzuela, the better ones in town, though not the best, definitely not the $30-a-night rooms where the pitcher’s teammates stayed, two to a room. Gomez had a sympathetic ear for his fellow Spanish speaker. A former manager of the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros and San Diego Padres, Gomez counseled Valenzuela on what needed to be done. And he reported back to the Angels on Valenzuela’s progress.

While watching an afternoon workout, Gomez cautioned a group of onlookers not to expect the “old Valenzuela” of the glory days with the Dodgers. “If he was still the old Fernando, he’d still be with the Dodgers,” Gomez said.

Gomez wasn’t the only former big leaguer watching Valenzuela up close during his minor league interlude. Nate (Pee Wee) Oliver, manager of the Palm Springs Angels, said he recognizes the difficulties a ballplayer has in accepting that his day in the sun is over at an age when many men’s careers are just taking off.

“It doesn’t make any difference how long you stay out,” said Oliver, who played for the Dodgers in the 1960s. “You’re always going to miss it.”

“You have to remember we’ve been in these uniforms since we were little kids. When you leave (baseball), you lose a part of you. In Fernando’s case, I’m sure he feels it’s premature and he doesn’t want to leave before it’s time.”

It’s an understandable feeling, said Costa Mesa sports psychologist Richard Lister, who has treated professional baseball players and consulted for pro teams. For many players, he said, the fear of looking foolish in public, of being a too-old player with too-dull skills, is outweighed by the need to decide for themselves that their careers are over.

To be “sitting in a living room, watching a game on television and wondering if you should be there would be too serious a nagging, psychological doubt,” said Lister, who played double-A ball, two steps down from the big leagues, until he was in his late 20s.

That may lead some to stay on longer than they should, their abilities waning, unwilling to give up the competition, the cheers of the fans, the adulation, Lister said.

But for those players, hanging on is the “right thing,” he said. “I go with trying to get the last drop out of the lemon” if that’s what a player wants to do.

For others, the fear of failure is dominant.

“Joe DiMaggio did it the right way for Joe,” Lister said, speaking of the former New York Yankees slugger who retired in 1951 at age 36. DiMaggio was “very, very image conscious. He quit early. He could have played another year or two, but he did it right for him.”

Leaning forward on a dugout bench, Valenzuela insisted it’s right for him to keep playing.

He said he enjoyed the extra months at home with his wife and four children. Children clearly are his favorites; wherever he went there were crowds of 50 or more children waiting outside the stadium after every game, whether he had pitched or not. When they saw him, they thrust trading cards or baseballs into his hands to sign.

He’d spend half an hour or more, patiently signing them all. In Jackson, waiting to board the team bus for the ride to Little Rock, the bus’ engines running, he signed andsigned until the last kid was satisfied.

To a questioner who wondered if he didn’t also miss the team camaraderie, he at first replied no. “I have my kids; that’s my team,” he said.

But later he amended his answer, admitting there was a bit of emptiness.

“That’s my life, baseball, being in the ballpark. I missed it. . . . I don’t do it (play baseball) because I have to work, because I need the money. The reason is I believe I can still pitch and I like playing this game. . . . It’s a nice game, a fun game.”

The pitcher’s tale is reminiscent of baseball in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s, when poor farm boys left their small towns to ride buses through the minor leagues in the hope that some day they would ride trains through the majors. Men like Paul and Dizzy Dean from Lucas, Ark., and Carl Hubbell of Carthage, Mo., escaped the grinding poverty of the Depression and the Dust Bowl to eat well and win applause by hitting and throwing baseballs.

Valenzuela was born in the state of Sonora, Mexico, the youngest of 12 children. Now he says the four children he and his wife have--boys 8 and 7, girls 5 years and 5 months--are plenty. He and his wife can give individual attention to each of their children and be sure they get a good education.

As a youth he shared a bed with one of his six brothers and rose in the morning to see family members go forth to till the land of others. His father and some of the brothers worked the family’s own small plot.

He calls Etchohuaquila, where he grew up, as “a poor town, a small town.”

After six or seven years of school in the village of 250 or so, “if you wanted to continue your education, you had to go to another town. That took money to ride the bus to get there and money to stay there. We were poor. We didn’t have that kind of money.”

In the village that didn’t get electricity until he was a teen-ager in the 1970s, he preferred baseball to school. He was only too happy to leave at age 15 and play professional ball in Mexico.

A Dodger scout discovered him pitching, alerted higher-ups and then signed Valenzuela, who was 17. He pitched for minor league teams in Lodi and San Antonio, and made it to the Dodgers for the final month of the 1980 season.

Valenzuela says things are different now back home and that if he could do it again it would be nice to get an education and play baseball at the same time. In an era when many new U.S. players come out of college ball, Valenzuela and the numerous athletes from the Dominican Republic are throwbacks, reminders of a time when professional baseball in this country was populated mostly by athletes whose education stopped short of high school.

Valenzuela said that in his time off he prefers to watch sports on television or play golf; he goes to the movies only if there’s something his children want to see. But the man who didn’t see much of the inside of a school also spends some of his free time visiting Southland schools, telling his young listeners to keep studying. His first public appearance after being cut by the Dodgers was at an elementary school in Huntington Beach in early May.

“When I go to the schools, I don’t go to the high schools,” he said. “Those kids already know to stay in school. I go to the 8- and 7-year-olds, because they really don’t know what school is like.”

Valenzuela’s icon status with many of the students and his enormous popularity in the Latino community is not lost on the attendance-hungry Angels executives, who know that Orange County itself is now 25% Latino.

At Palm Springs, where 5,100 jammed in to see him pitch, there was nearly as much Spanish spoken in the stands as English. One of those Spanish speakers was Fred Salazar, a caterer who lives in Palm Springs and brought his wife and two children with him.

“I’m here to see Fernando,” Salazar said. “In fact, my parents came out from Banning for the game.”

Ruben Valentin, who has broadcast the Angel games in Spanish for six years over radio station XPRS, said Fernando’s pitching is “going to increase our listening audience at least double what we have now, maybe triple.”

As soon as the Angels announced that Valenzuela might pitch for the team, a radio network

in Mexico called, seeking to broadcast his games across Mexico.

Valentin said he’d been “telling whoever listens” that “if you bring in a good Mexican player, a Fernando or a (Milwaukee Brewers pitcher) Teddy Higuera, somebody like that will draw a lot of the Spanish-speaking people, especially the Mexicans. They need somebody. When they have somebody like Fernando, who is the only one they have in the big leagues, they go all out for them.” Valentin said attendance will “definitely” increase when Valenzuela pitches, perhaps by as many as 10,000 fans per game.

Valenzuela’s agent, Tony DeMarco, said the pitcher will be a popular draw in Orange County cities with large Latino populations, such as Anaheim and Santa Ana.

Cuban-born Preston Gomez, who started playing professional baseball in 1944, reeled off a list of great Latino baseball players over breakfast one morning in Little Rock. Among the names were Minnie Minoso, Bobby Avila, Roberto Clemente.

“I have not seen any of them have the impact that Fernando had on the public those first four or five years with the Dodgers, the Hispanic community and all fans,” said Gomez, who now lives in semi-retirement in Newport Beach. He works as an assistant to the Angels’ general manager and makes occasional swings around the country to keep tabs on the Angels’ minor-league players.

In Mexico, Valenzuela is a “national hero,” Gomez said, the poor boy off the farm who dined at the White House with President Ronald Reagan and then-Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo. Whenever there’s a big parade in Mexico, “they always want Fernando.”

When the Angels announced they had signed him, the team’s phones began ringing off the hook, with most of the calls from the Los Angeles area. People wanted to know when he would pitch; they wanted tickets to see him. Thursday, the line for tickets formed before 9 a.m. at Anaheim stadium and fans lined up throughout the day.

Valenzuela’s comeback has drawn attention not only at the box office but on the ball fields of Santa Ana. At Adams Park near the corner of Warner Avenue and Raitt Street, kids 6 and 7 years old were hitting baseballs off tees one day this week and running the bases with more enthusiasm than skill. Nearby in the park, older youths played unorganized ball at its finest.

Pitcher Gerardo Avina, 12, insisted that the batter who had just smashed a long drive to the outfield had missed third base and was out. The batter was equally vehement that his hit was a home run. Another friend, Adam Chavez, cracked jokes in Spanish and English at Avina and soon the two boys were wrestling on the grass.

Gabriel Cueva, 12, said Valenzuela “was better when he was young.” Chavez, 11, said Valenzuela “used to pitch good.” All the boys live in apartments near Adams Park, and their favorite athletes nowadays are Wally Joyner, Darryl Strawberry, Bo Jackson. But the kids enjoy going to Anaheim stadium three or four times a year and want to be there when Valenzuela pitches.

A few blocks north, all the players on the Santa Ana High School summer baseball team are Latino. And just about all of them said they wanted to be in Anaheim Stadium tonight to watch Valenzuela. Team coach Bob Glassman said the main topic at practice was Valenzuela’s comeback.

“He still has that drawing power, he still is a role model, even though he’s been around the block a few times,” Glassman said.

Valenzuela knows how popular he is--on the nights he pitched in the minors, normal attendance doubled and tripled, with fans standing on the field in fair territory and foul. But he plays down his appeal as he does most things. He simply says it’s nice to have fans come to see a baseball game.

He chats with fans when he can, switching easily from English to Spanish when necessary. After using an interpreter at press conferences in his early years, he says he learned by “just listening to the other players.”

Colleagues say that while he’ll occasionally play pranks, such as hiding a teammate’s glove, he’s not the team spark plug or chatterbox. Mexican League teammates called him “Senor Silent.” He’s nervous around reporters he doesn’t know, especially when the subject veers from baseball. But during his recent 11-day stint in the minors, he would remain after the games to take question after question from local writers, and he got rave reviews from the local press.

He steers clear of personal questions when he can, but he does say he and his wife live in a quiet suburban neighborhood “close to L.A.” In uniform and out, he says, he hasn’t felt any discrimination. People “treat me like anybody, no different.”

His two oldest children are in public school. The 8-year-old is “a pretty good student,” Valenzuela said, and a budding athlete nicknamed “Little Lefty.” He tosses and catches a baseball with his father, joins him on the golf course, and goes with the rest of the family to the ballpark to watch him pitch.

After 10 years as a celebrity, being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph “is part of my life,” Valenzuela said. When he has the time, he stops and signs. “It’s not a big problem. It’s a good experience, and the people don’t bother me. They’re pretty nice.” If he doesn’t have time, “I say, ‘Maybe a little later.’ They understand.”

And he understands that when the Dodgers let him go, “it was business.” He is carefully not to bad-mouth his old team. “They gave me a chance to play baseball, and I played for 10 years,” he said.

And what happens if the comeback does not succeed? Valenzuela didn’t even ponder the question. “Who knows?” he replied. “You can’t make plans for two years, three years (in the future). I like to take it day by day, day by day.”

“I never like to talk about that, the future,” he said, although he did admit to hoping to play baseball for another four or five years.

“I started playing baseball professionally (at) age 15, too young. So I have 15 years already in baseball, throwing balls. . . . Right now it’s perfect. I want to keep throwing because I believe I can still pitch. It’s a nice game, a fun game. Now in the American League, it’s a new experience for me. . . . It’s my first time being in this league and probably I’ll meet different kinds of fans (whom) I don’t know, (see) different places, different ballparks. It’s exciting.

“I’m very happy now; the Angels gave me a chance to get back to the big leagues.”

But he knows that staying in the majors may not be easy. Batters in Jackson and Little Rock struck out on pitches that could be blasted for home runs by sluggers of the Detroit Tigers, the team Valenzuela faces tonight.

The pitcher knows the pressure on him. Confident, but perhaps realistic, he cautions fans not to expect too much, too soon.

“I’ll try to do my best,” Valenzuela shrugged. “The Angels, the fans are expecting a lot from me. . . . If I don’t have a good game, you may hear fans say, ‘Oh, he should retire’ or something like that. That’s the first thing they’re thinking, ‘Oh, he’s trying hard and he doesn’t have anything.’ I have. I have an arm that’s healthy. But . . . hitters want to hit the ball, too, that’s their job. That’s baseball.”

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