Dodgers Opinion: Fernando is an LA legend. But the HOF committee got this one right

LOS ANGELES — This post is going to annoy some of you, but so be it. We as Dodger fans have to face the facts: Fernando Valenzuela is a Dodger Immortal. That doesn’t automatically make him a Hall of Famer.

If you grew up a Dodger fan in the 80s or have spent any time around this franchise, you do not need to be told what Fernando Valenzuela meant to Los Angeles. Fernandomania changed this team, this city, and the relationship between the Dodgers and Latino fans. His number 34 deserved to go up in left field. His mural in Boyle Heights is earned. His place in Dodger history is permanent.

Where I part ways with Bill Shaikin’s recent L.A. Times column is on what all of that should mean for Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be a museum of the very best careers in baseball history, not a museum of the most important stories. When you look at the full statistical record, Fernando is a Dodger all-timer, but he is not a Hall of Famer. And elevating him on narrative grounds alone would shortchange other Dodgers such as Orel Hershiser and Steve Garvey who actually put up stronger overall résumés and still have not gotten in.

Peak vs. career: two very different Fernandos

Nobody is denying the peak. From 1981–1986, Fernando went 97–68 with an ERA just under 3.00, threw 84 complete games and 26 shutouts, and piled up roughly 27 Wins Above Replacement (WAR), about 4½ WAR per season. That is legitimate ace territory. Add in the 1981 Cy Young and Rookie of the Year double, the 147-pitch complete game in the ’81 World Series, and a 5–1, 1.98 ERA postseason line, and you have one of the great six-year runs any Dodger pitcher has ever had.

The problem is what happened after that. Shoulder issues and a massive early workload caught up to him. From 1987 through 1997, across stints with the Dodgers, Angels, Orioles, Phillies, Padres and Cardinals, he added only about 14 more WAR to his total. If the first half of his career looks like an ace, the second half looks like a back-of-the-rotation innings-eater.

The final line is good but not historic: 173–153, 3.54 ERA, 2,074 strikeouts in 2,930 innings. That is the profile of the Hall of Very Good. It is not what we usually mean by “all-time great.”

How he stacks up against actual Hall of Fame starters

One of the fairest ways to judge Hall candidates is JAWS, the system Jay Jaffe developed that blends career WAR and seven-year peak WAR and compares players to the average Hall of Famer at their position.

For starting pitchers:

• Average Hall of Fame starter: about 72.9 career WAR and 56.8 “S-JAWS”.
• Fernando Valenzuela: 41.4 career WAR and 36.6 S-JAWS, ranking roughly 170-plus among starting pitchers.

That puts him ahead of only a handful of the weakest Hall starters (names like Catfish Hunter and Jesse Haines) and far behind the typical Hall profile.

And this is where the “but his ERA is better than 11 Hall of Famers, including Jack Morris” argument in the Times piece falls apart. Jack Morris is widely cited as one of the most controversial selections the Veterans Committee has ever made. If your best statistical comp for a candidate is “barely cleared the bar and most analysts think that was a mistake,” that is not a strong case. You do not fix one borderline election by creating more of them.

What about fairness to Hershiser, Garvey, and other Dodger greats?

If we are going to start bending the standards based on impact and memories, we have to talk about some other Dodgers who are still on the outside looking in.

Orel Hershiser
Hershiser finished 204–150 with a 3.48 ERA and about 56 WAR, which is roughly 15 WAR more than Fernando. His JAWS score sits around 48, which, while still short of the Hall average, is significantly closer than Valenzuela’s. He owns one of the most famous records in modern pitching (59 straight scoreless innings), carried the Dodgers to the 1988 title, and was a workhorse deep into his 30s.

Steve Garvey
On the position-player side, Garvey collected 2,599 hits, hit .294 with 272 homers, made 10 All-Star teams, and anchored one of the most iconic infields in baseball history. His career WAR (about 38) is just a shade below Fernando’s 41, but at a much higher level of playing time and with a longer run as a star.

I am not arguing that Hershiser or Garvey are slam-dunk Hall of Famers. Quite the opposite. The committees have looked at both and decided “not quite.” What I am saying is that if you are going to grant Fernando a plaque primarily on cultural impact while guys like Hershiser and Garvey are still out, you are sending a pretty confusing message about how the bar works and who actually cleared it.

Cultural impact is real. It is also already recognized.

The Times column is right about something important: Fernandomania was not just about strikeouts and shutouts.

He helped bring Latino fans back to a stadium built on the ruins of Chavez Ravine neighborhoods. He turned Dodgers radio into a cross-border phenomenon. Half the TVs in L.A. really were tuned to his starts. He made the Dodgers “Mexico’s team” in a way that still matters today, with a Latino fan base that has grown from around 10% when Jaime Jarrín started to close to half the ballpark now.

All of that deserves to be honored. And it has been honored:

• The Dodgers retired his number 34 in 2023.
• The Mexican League retired 34 across the entire league.
• He is in the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame and various Latino and Caribbean Halls.
• There is literally a giant mural of him in Boyle Heights and a lifetime of stories in this city about what he meant.

Cooperstown is not the only way to acknowledge a player’s importance. If the Hall wants to “preserve history” and “connect generations,” it can do that with a Fernandomania exhibit, with artifacts, photos, and video of those nights when Dodger Stadium looked like a cathedral. It does not have to rewrite what “honoring excellence” means on the plaque level to accomplish that.

The committee just weighed all of this. They landed where the numbers land.

This is not just a blogger with a spreadsheet pushing back against sentiment. The very Contemporary Baseball Era committee that the Times was lobbying has already voted. Fernando did not come close to the 12 votes needed and reportedly received fewer than five.

That group included Hall of Famers, executives, and people who absolutely understand Fernandomania and what it meant. They also understand that once you start enshrining “borderline by the numbers but huge culturally” pitchers, you are opening the door to a long list of similar cases. They chose to keep the bar where it has generally been, even for beloved names like Hershiser, Garvey, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy.

To me, that feels right.

Fernando Valenzuela is a Dodger immortal. His number on the façade, his stories, and his impact on Mexican and Mexican-American baseball fans are forever. But the Hall of Fame is supposed to be about careers that meet a very specific standard of sustained excellence. On that front, as much as it pains me to admit it, Fernando’s record comes up short.

Loving the player and protecting the standard are not contradictions. In this case, they are the same thing.

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