April 9, 2021
The mystery pitcher began appearing in my morning box scores during the second half of September 1980. Sometimes he was Valenzuela, others Valenzla, but every time I looked, he had zeroes next to his name. I couldn’t find him in my baseball card set, my
Street & Smith’s Official Yearbook 1980, or my
Complete Handbook of Baseball 1980. All I knew was that suddenly he was one of the Dodgers’ most reliable relievers, a rookie thrown into the fire of a three-way NL West race between the Dodgers, Astros, and Reds.
What I didn’t know was that just over six months later, everybody who was anybody would know the name Fernando Valenzuela and the trail of zeroes he left in his wake. Fernandomania was coming.
Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
Tommy Lasorda is synonymous with the Dodgers, but his lifetime in blue might have become a career in brown. For about five weeks nearly 70 years ago, Lasorda spent a spring training with St. Louis.
Heading into the 1953 season, Lasorda was 25 years old, and pitched in the Dodgers’ farm system for four years. The previous three years were with Triple-A Montreal, with Lasorda going 35-17 with a 3.35 ERA in 489 innings.
But he couldn’t yet breakthrough to the majors on a team that won the most games in the National League over the previous three seasons. Opportunity came in the form of a trade, or rather a sale. The St. Louis Browns purchased Lasorda and shortstop Billy Hunter from the Dodgers. The sale price was somewhere between $120,000 (a 2003 article by Rick Hummel in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentioned $50,000 for Lasorda and $70,000 for Hunter) and $140,000 (from
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