Mania Man Long after Fernandomania swept the nation, Mexico's greatest beisbol export still has the game in his blood--and his bloodlines. Are you ready for Fernandito?

It was November 1997, and Fernando Valenzuela was a 37-year-old
pitcher suffering from arm fatigue and losing his battle to stay
in shape. Three months earlier he'd been let go by the St. Louis
Cardinals, and it appeared then that after 17 years in the
majors, he was done as a player. Yet here he was, standing on the
mound in the uniform of Los Naranjeros de Hermosillo of the
Mexican Pacific League, the same winter league in which, as a
16-year-old, he'd struck out his first batter as a pro. ¶ "I
thought I might be good for one more year," Valenzuela says now.
"I needed to keep playing. I am Mexican. I wanted to put on a good
show in front of my people." In truth, he just couldn't give up
the game.

So Valenzuela, the once-beloved object of Fernandomania and the
most prominent member of Mexico's pantheon of peloteros, pitched
for four months over each of the next five winters, winning 13 of
21 decisions, until his contract with Hermosillo expired in
January 2002. He was 41, and there was no place left to play.

By then his oldest child, Fernando Jr., was a standout first
baseman at Glendale (Calif.) Community College, living at home in
Hollywood Hills with the family. The following fall, Fernandito,
as the son is affectionately known, would leave for UNLV, to
enroll for his junior year and play Division I baseball.

A carbon copy of his father, with the same jet-black hair, round
cheeks and baby-faced smile, Fernandito also shares his father's
passion for the game. "A lot of kids get to the point where they
say, 'I don't want to play baseball anymore,'" Fernandito says.
"I'm different. I want to get as far as I can and do the best
that I can. That's something that has been passed on to me
through my dad."

Valenzuela drove his son across the desert and helped him settle
into a rented off-campus condo. In the first week of fall
practice, Fernandito turned heads with his bat and his glove, and
this spring he led the Rebels to a 47-17 record and an appearance
at the NCAA regional final.

Many times during the season his father was there to watch. And
as he stood in the stands and soaked in his son's success, the
older and more famous Valenzuela finally began to accept his own
exit from the game.

It's not easy coping with the ultimate truth that every player's
final deal is a one-way trade out the stadium door, a sometimes
brutal segue into una vida sin beisbol. For Fernando (El Toro)
Valenzuela, who as a 20-year-old rookie lefthander in 1981
electrified Southern California with his aura of youthful
invincibility on the mound, it has been a particularly rough
retreat. So much early success, so much fawning attention. Just
imagine being in his spikes in the spring and summer of '81....

After lefthander Jerry Reuss pulled a leg muscle 24 hours before
his scheduled Opening Day start, Valenzuela got the call to start
the season, and he shut out the Houston Astros 2-0 on five hits.
By mid-May he was 8-0 with a 0.50 ERA, and Fernandomania was
sweeping the country. Relying on a screwball (lanzamiento de
tornillo) that he had learned a year earlier, he threw seven
complete games and five shutouts--including 36 consecutive
scoreless innings--in those first eight starts.

He was the National League's starting pitcher in the All-Star
Game (he tossed one scoreless inning) and finished the
strike-interrupted season with a 13-7 record, a 2.48 ERA and
National League highs in strikeouts (180), complete games (11)
and shutouts (eight). He even hit .250 and had two game-winning
RBIs. With a loopy windup and eyes that rolled skyward in the
middle of his delivery, Valenzuela was the first player in either
league to win Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award in the
same year.

The tidal wave of attention that season would have been enough to
drown any 20-year-old, to say nothing of a foreigner hampered by
the language barrier and overwhelmed by El Norte's fast-paced
lifestyle. More than 20 years later Latino athletes still
struggle to adjust to life in the U.S.; for Valenzuela everything
was magnified a hundredfold. "Pitching in front of the huge
crowds was the easiest part," he says. "The difficulties were
away from the game." It was in the relentless glare of the media
that he felt most vulnerable.

Valenzuela can recall his frustration in trying to answer
reporters' questions--which he willingly attempted to do in press
conferences at the start of every series on the road--even after
he got a translator he was comfortable with, Dodgers
Spanish-language announcer Jaime Jarrin. New York was the most
intense, of course. "I remember entering a room and being
stunned," says Valenzuela. "There were about 60 photographers,
and that's without counting TV cameras and journalists."

He put the finishing touch on his rookie season by going 3-1 with
a 2.22 ERA in three postseason series, and the Dodgers won the
World Series in six games over the New York Yankees.

Act II? Are you kidding?

Valenzuela spent 10 mostly successful seasons in L.A., his best
one (after his rookie year) coming in 1986, when he was 21-11
with a 3.14 ERA, 242 strikeouts and a league-high 20 complete
games. And he was not just a popular player and a crafty
lefty--he was a marketing juggernaut. He galvanized the interest
of millions of Latinos and was the main reason the Dodgers had
the largest home attendance in team history in '82 and '83. "It
happened so fast it was like a forest fire," says Tommy Lasorda,
his manager at the time. "He had tremendous impact on the
Dodgers, the fans and all of baseball. Everywhere we went
everyone wanted to see this lefthander from Mexico pitch. He
attracted crowds on the road and at home like you've never seen.
Fernandomania was something I will never forget."

Valenzuela's cashable celebrity opened corporate America's eyes
to the idea of marketing Hispanic players to a Latino audience
hungry for heroes in their own likeness. The young phenom swung
open the doors that future Latino megastars like Alex Rodriguez
and Sammy Sosa would walk through.

In the six seasons from 1982 through '87, Valenzuela averaged 266
innings pitched per year and 7 2/3 innings per start, heavy work
for any pitcher and especially for a young arm that threw so many
screwballs. He missed eight weeks of the '88 season with a
shoulder injury but two years later pitched a no-hitter against
the St. Louis Cardinals. Arm weary, he went 13-13 with a 4.59 ERA
in 1990, and the Dodgers released him in spring training the
following year. Over the next six seasons Valenzuela spent time
with five major league teams, did a stint in the minors and went
home to play in the Mexican summer league twice. He recaptured a
bit of the magic in '96 when he went 13-8 with a 3.62 ERA to help
the San Diego Padres win the NL West.

By the time the Cardinals released him, in 1997, Valenzuela at
least recognized that his big league career was over. "I knew I
couldn't take the intense training and preparation required to
compete at the major league level," he says. "But I didn't want
to announce my retirement. I wanted to keep pitching at whatever
level I could."

For Fernando and Fernandito, the generation gap is little more
than a fissure. To be sure, padre and hijo have their
differences. (For one, Dad is partial to las Nortenas,
traditional Northern Mexican folk songs; his son opts for hip-hop
and rap.) But the family bond is strong, and is for all the
Valenzuelas, including Fernandito's younger siblings Ricardo, 19,
a 6'4" offensive lineman at Glendale Community College; Linda,
17, a high school volleyballer at Immaculate Heart; and Maria
Fernanda, 12, who favors softball. When Fernando and Linda, his
wife of 21 years, bought a place for Fernandito to live in
Henderson, Nev., 15 minutes from school, they chose a
three-bedroom town house with plenty of room for visiting family
members in town to watch UNLV home games.

What those visitors saw was a soft-handed 5'11", 220-pound first
baseman who batted .337, with 14 home runs and 75 RBIs, and was
named Mountain West Conference Player of the Year. "He knows what
pitches he can handle and likes to get deep into the count," says
Rebels coach Jim Schlossnagle. "And he's the best defensive first
baseman I've ever coached. His glove really saved us this
season." In the major league draft on June 3 Fernandito was
selected in the 10th round by the Padres; last Thursday, in his
professional debut with the Single-A Eugene (Ore.) Emeralds, he
went 4 for 6 with two homers, a double and six RBIs.

What's more, he's achieved all this without feeling any of the
pressure of following in his father's famous footsteps. "Fernando
loves to talk about his dad," says Schlossnagle. "He's always
talking about what an honor it is to have the same name." Says
Dad, "I've always tried to give my son space. I don't want him to
play this sport because I did. I want him to feel it. To carry it
in his blood."

Fernandito is 20 now, the age at which his father made his
spectacular debut with the Dodgers. But whereas Fernando grew up
the youngest of 12 children crammed into a five-room adobe farm
house in Etchohuaquila, Mexico, Fernandito was nurtured in an
eight-bedroom L.A. manse. ("I've had it much easier," he says. "I
got a chance to go to college. My dad didn't have that
opportunity.") Valenzuela credits his wife's business savvy for
enabling the family to live well since the end of his major
league career. In the mid-1980s Linda persuaded her husband to
invest in real estate, and she laid the groundwork for a realty
business that has grown to include residential complexes in three
states.

The Valenzuelas also still own the small ranch-style Hollywood
house they bought 15 years ago to serve as an office. It houses a
Fernandomania museum of sorts, displaying his Cy Young trophy,
plus magazine covers and a photo gallery of memorable moments on
and off the field (including shots of Valenzuela meeting with
presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton). It's a comfortable
setting for Valenzuela to meet with business associates and
visiting media, and it's also where he sifts through boxes of fan
mail and signs each ball and magazine cover that arrives with
suitable return packaging.

The Dodgers recently announced that Valenzuela will be making a
comeback with the team, not as a pitcher but as a pitchman,
representing the club at civic functions and charity events as
well as working as an analyst on the Spanish-language radio
network that broadcasts L.A. games. "We've been trying to find
the perfect situation for Fernando," said Derrick Hall, the
Dodgers' senior V.P. of communications. "This fits his
personality well, and he will bring magic to what is already the
best Spanish broadcast team in baseball."

El Toro still has his passion for the game, but he's happy enough
now just to watch it and contribute in smaller ways. Fernando has
given way to Fernandito, and there is comfort in knowing that the
Valenzuela legacy is in soft hands.

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY V.J. LOVERO HOLA, AMIGO The bubble-blowing Valenzuela is back in Dodger blue as a color man on Spanish radio.

B/W PHOTO: VINCE STREANO/CORBIS [See caption above]

B/W PHOTO: ANDY HAYT TRIPLE PLAY In '81 Valenzuela won Rookie of the Year, the Cy Young and a World Series.

COLOR PHOTO: SANDRA TENUTO PADRE PRIDE Fernandito, a UNLV slugger drafted this year by San Diego, has his dad's smile and passion for the game.

Fernandomania "was LIKE A FOREST FIRE," says Lasorda. "Everywhere
we went people wanted to see this lefty from Mexico."