Sixty-two-year-old Dodger Stadium will host the World Series starting on Friday, but it will be a bittersweet day for fans, hosting the first Dodger game since the death of franchise icon Fernando Valenzuela.
Valenzuela died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of just 62. As a six-time All Star and World Series champion with the Dodgers in 1981, Valenzuela was also a cultural icon to the local Los Angeles-based Dodger fans, who embraced the team after it moved from Brooklyn in 1958.
Hollywood actor Danny Trejo, a lifelong Los Angeles local, remembers the day the Dodgers came to his hometown. He was just 14 years old when they began their inaugural season in the City of Angels. He remembers the grueling and controversial process that got the franchise its $23 million stadium built in the Chavez Ravine.
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“When the Dodgers first came to L.A. there was a big controversy about them moving people out,” Trejo told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.
The land used for Dodger Stadium in the 1950s had previously been seized from local owners and inhabitants in the early 1950s by the city of Los Angeles, using eminent domain with funds from the federal Housing Act of 1949.
It meant that any of the local residents who lived there had to accept a payout from the city to leave their property. Eminent domain gave the city the power to take private property for public use. It is a right that is only reserved by the government, as it does not include the power to take and transfer ownership of private property from one property owner to another.
“They paid everybody, but a lot of people just didn’t want to move,” Trejo said. “And it was like, a lot of shacks up there. I used to run around up there when I was a kid. So when they started building the stadium, we started cutting school and going up there to watch them build it.”
On Friday, May 8, 1959, bulldozers and sheriff’s deputies showed up to forcibly evict the last few families in Chavez Ravine. Residents of the area called it Black Friday. Some families even had their doors kicked down, and their furniture was forcibly hauled out.
Many of the affected people in that community were Mexican Americans.
Trejo said he did not have any friends who lived in the area who were forced to relocate.
Trejo recalled a mass migration of incoming workers from other parts of the country, enticed by the business of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“A lot of people from like Georgia and Wisconsin… there’s a lot of people that migrated,” Trejo said. “There’d be about 30 kids [that moved there] from different schools that had cut school and get up there to watch them work and build the stadium.”
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Then, over the course of the franchise’s first 21 years in Los Angeles, the team went to seven World Series, winning three of them, as Dodger Stadium quickly became one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles.
However, when Valenzuela arrived in 1980, he famously grew the Dodger fan base among the region’s Latin American population, as the star pitcher was born and raised in Mexico.
“Fernando was credited with bringing a lot of the Latinos back,” Trejo said. “My older relatives would watch baseball at home until Fernando came in… they immediately started buying tickets and stuff.”
Valenzuela garnered such a passionate following from L.A.’s latino population, that Trejo said he would often get comments from police officers on days when Valenzuel was pitching.
“If you were in east L.A. and Fernando was pitching, the cops would ask you, ‘Hey, how come you’re not at the stadium?'” Trejo said.
Valenzuela helped lead the Dodgers to their first World Series title in 16 years when they defeated the New York Yankees in 1981. He remains the only pitcher in MLB history to win the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season. The left-hander was the National League’s starting pitcher in the All-Star Game in 1981.
Valenzuela enjoyed his breakout year in 1981, when “Fernandomania” made him a city icon. Trejo recounts images of 8-year-old girls wearing Valenzuela hats and jerseys, and “aubelitas” who would go berserk watching the star hurler pitch for the Dodgers.
“He brought a complete new audience to Los Angeles baseball,” Trejo said.
Now, the Dodgers will look to repeat what the star pitcher helped accomplish in 1981 by defeating the Yankees in the World Series.
Trejo confidently predicts that they will get it done.
“Fernando is with us.”
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