WINTER WONDER

Fernando Valenzuela still glances to the sky just before delivering each pitch for the Hermosillo Orange Growers in the Mexican Pacific League.

It’s as if he were thanking the heavens for the fun he’s still having on the ball field and the peace of mind he enjoys, nearly 20 years after his famed Dodger debut and a decade after some people thought he ought to call it quits.

A mini-Fernandomania is buzzing through the arid coastal cities of northwestern Mexico these bright winter days. Valenzuela, just past his 40th birthday on Nov. 1, is enjoying success. He has a 7-4 record, with an earned-run average of 3.69. And just as in his prime, attendance shoots up every time he starts, both at home and on the road.

So what if the stadiums hold only a few thousand fans and his number, still 34, is on the front of his uniform because the phone company logo fills the back. Valenzuela is doing what he loves, and doing it better than he has in years.

Valenzuela won his first six decisions for the Hermosillo Naranjeros--Spanish for Orange Growers--in the Mexican winter league this season. Then he dropped three close games, but won again the week before Christmas. Tuesday, in his regular-season finale at Mexicali, he got a taste of the Christmas blues, giving up nine runs in 2 2/3 innings.

This isn’t the big leagues, but it’s not pickup ball, either. It’s triple-A level and attracts dozens of major leaguers who want to stay in shape as well as talented young Mexicans hungry for their big break.

Valenzuela’s six consecutive victories brought to mind his lightning start in his first full season with the Dodgers in 1981, when he won his first eight games--five of them shutouts--and went on to become the first player to win the Cy Young and rookie-of-the-year-awards in the same season.

After his great decade with the Dodgers, when he averaged 33 starts a year and pitched 2,348 2/3 innings en route to a 141-116 record, Valenzuela kicked around the majors with five teams, the Angels and San Diego Padres among them, over six more hard years until his big league career ended in 1997 with an 0-4 season for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Then he came home to Mexico and to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state. Even here it took a couple of years, but Valenzuela finally rediscovered the simpler joys of baseball.

“I’m at ease, confident and comfortable with myself,” Valenzuela said in an interview beside the pool of his modest hotel near the pretty Hermosillo ballpark, a day after his recent victory over the Los Mochis Caneros (Cane Cutters).

It was vintage Valenzuela as he mixed up nasty screwballs and slow curves with a fastball that now just barely exceeds 80 mph, according to one scout’s speed gun. And just as in days past, he got out of a nasty jam. After giving up two solo homers and two walks in the fifth, he escaped with a ground-ball double play.

He left after six complete innings with a 3-2 lead, closing with his only strikeout of the night, and the Naranjeros held on for a 5-3 victory. The team is headed for the playoffs in January and perhaps the Caribbean Series in February, the Latin American championship.

Only about 4,000 turned out to see him this night, just before the holidays. But team business manager Marco Antonio Manzo says attendance usually goes up by 40% when Valenzuela pitches, though it rarely reaches 10,000. And other teams are calling him to plead with the Naranjeros to make sure Valenzuela pitches when he comes to their town.

It doesn’t hurt to have teammates like fellow Mexican Vinny Castilla, the power-hitting third baseman who had three consecutive 40-homer years with the Colorado Rockies before this past injury-ridden season with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and rising star Erubiel Durazo of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who is from Hermosillo.

Castilla and Durazo hit successive home runs in the fourth to give Valenzuela his lead. And ex-Dodger Trenidad Hubbard helped save Valenzuela’s victory by hustling an apparent line single into a double in the eighth, then stealing third and scoring on a bad throw by the catcher.

Valenzuela might be all guile and deception these days, but he is still every inch El Toro, with his characteristic scrunch-shouldered amble and his jutting lower jaw. For his teammates and the league and the baseball fans of northern Mexico, he is a powerful legend. Former President Ernesto Zedillo recently named him Mexican pitcher of the century.

Derek Bryant, the Naranjeros’ manager, credits Valenzuela with setting a powerful model for young Mexican players.

“He leads by example, the way he goes out and fights every batter,” Bryant said. “He’s not here to get by. He’s here to compete and win.”

Valenzuela and his coaches agree he did two things different this year to regain his success after a so-so season in 1999: He came early and trained harder than ever, and he tried some different pitches.

“Fernando finally accepted that he needed to make an adjustment and that he’s not the same Fernando physically,” said Bryant, who played for the Oakland Athletics in 1979. “His pitches were in the comfort zone--they weren’t fast enough to get by hitters or slow enough to fool them. So he’s using more off-speed pitches, and it’s given him the feeling that he is again a top pitcher.”

His pitching coach and friend, former Atlanta Brave Maximino Leon, predicted Valenzuela probably has two more seasons in him.

“He has been a great student of baseball, and he has surprised all of us,” Leon said. “Last year, I didn’t think he had enough left to return with success. I never expected him to have the success he is having this year.”

The big question is why a great star with well-managed personal finances would bother to put up with the small towns and smallish crowds in his twilight years?

Leon replies, “There’s still this kid inside him. He still is that kid who played baseball with this passion, this drive. He doesn’t want to abandon this career when he knows that he can still harvest applause.”

In the poolside interview, Valenzuela deciphered what he means when he says he keeps playing simply because he loves the game.

“First, I like the competition itself,” he said. “Each pitch, each batter is beautiful because you have to think, you have to learn.”

He said he talks all the time to hitters.

“I ask them, in this situation what pitch would you expect? If there are men on base, they say something that moves, not a fastball, so I’ll slip in a fastball. One has to think like they think. I try to anticipate what they believe they’ll get.

“To keep going in baseball, you have to learn all the time.”

He knows he’s lost speed, but adds that raw heat was never his secret; he threw 87- or 88-mph fastballs in his prime. His strength was and is control.

“I have to keep working and working, looking for the corners,” he said.

The second motivator is playing at home, only three hours from the tiny dust-poor village of communal farmers where he was born and that he left at 15 to start playing pro ball in the Mexican leagues.

“It’s the opportunity for me to give something to the people, whatever I have left to give them, in return for all the support the people have given me,” Valenzuela said. “At this point in my career, in the new millennium, to hear people cheering in the stands about baseball and about what you’ve achieved, it keeps you going.

“It is very important to me that the people value what I have done in baseball. So one tries to do the best possible. When one can no longer do things well, it’s time to leave baseball. It’s respect for the people who pay for the tickets.”

Asked whether having such a good year makes him hope the phone might ring one last time, he is clear: “I believe it is too late for that now. Big league baseball? You have to be realistic. At this point in my career, I don’t even consider it. You have to forget about it.”

Former Dodger Hubbard was more generous, saying, “I’d venture that if somebody gave him that opportunity, he’d show such poise and experience on the mound that I’m sure he could win double-digit games in the United States. I believe that. I don’t know if he does.”

Hubbard said Valenzuela “still has that professionalism, that will to win and that craftiness that kept everyone at bay in the big leagues. And he’s still doing it.”

One reason for his lack of major league interest: Valenzuela enjoys his quiet summers at home in Los Angeles with his wife Linda and their four children. Fernando Jr. is an 18-year-old at Glendale Community College and a solid left-handed first baseman. Ricardo, 16, is a football player in high school. His daughters are Linda, 14, and Maria Fernanda, 9. He’s an avid and talented golfer.

With distance from his unexpected release in 1991, he harbors no bitterness toward the Dodgers and scoffs at the conventional wisdom that Tom Lasorda used him too much and wore out his arm.

“Even now Derek Bryant also comes out to the mound and tells me that’s enough, and I say, ‘No, I’m fine.’ In the ‘80s, I always said I didn’t want to leave the mound. Hey, I play once a week, I want to stay in the game. Because what I love to do is play. Tommy didn’t force me to stay on the field.”

How long will he keep playing?

“Since 1991, they’ve told me it was my last year, that I should retire, and we’re in 2000 and I’m still going,” he said, chuckling.

“When I can’t do this, when I can’t get outs, then I will stop. Perhaps this year, perhaps next year, perhaps five more years. But it’s not just to keep playing, it’s helping, being part of the team, contributing.”

And Valenzuela’s competitive drive is intact. He has his eyes on one more title.

“I want to be a champion in Mexico,” he said. “I’ve never had the chance to be part of a champion team in Mexico.

“I am doing what I love, enjoying baseball, and it’s in my own country, and I never had the opportunity before to show my people what I can do.”

In the stands the other night was Mike Brito, the legendary Dodger scout who signed Valenzuela and 21 other big leaguers over the last 23 years. Brito agreed that Valenzuela was among the last of his breed, a poor kid from the hinterland who quit school to play ball and made it on the strength of the fire inside him. Now the young Mexican hopefuls are bigger, stronger and faster, thanks to better nutrition and training.

Brito also had signed Valenzuela’s young opponent, Victor Alvarez, a tall and rangy Mexican pitcher playing for the Dodgers in double-A. Alvarez has a fastball that hits 92 mph. These young players have great natural talent and carefully honed development programs.

“Fernando is a warrior, he never gives up,” Brito said, watching from his traditional seat behind home plate. “In the last inning, he looked tired, then he threw two great pitches and struck the guy out. He always gets out of trouble with a big pitch. And the people love him.”

Brito acknowledges Valenzuela’s huge role in helping Mexicans break into baseball.

“Before him, the Mexican players didn’t have any ambitions,” Brito said. “After they saw the success of Fernando Valenzuela, then all of Mexico wanted to play in the big leagues. He opened the door.”

Bryant said Valenzuela still is a quiet but potent example for the team.

“He’s an extreme professional,” Bryant said. “The way he goes about the game, the way he competes, these young kids are seeing that, and that’s what this organization wants from him.

“The day he gets bombed and can’t compete, then I’m sure he’ll say, that’s enough, because he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. But right now he’s still having fun, he’s able to compete and he’s doing what he loves and he’s with the people he loves being around. You can’t beat that.”

Mexico City Bureau Chief Smith was recently on assignment in Hermosillo.