Erik Sherman. Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023.
In structuring this dual-topic book, Sherman artfully integrates a sociological exploration of the rise of Mexican-American fandom for the Los Angeles Dodgers with a biographical examination of the life of Mexican-born Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela. While this overall concept was an excellent choice, Sherman’s presentation is more popular history than incisive analysis by a historian.
Of the two topics, the societal elements are the stronger rhetorical portion of this book. Sherman includes three chapters as background on the history of the land-taking that resulted in the forced removal of Mexican-American residents from Chavez Ravine (the soon-to-be location of Dodger Stadium) and then intersperses Mexican-American fan-development episodes within the biographical portion. Sherman executes well on the book-jacket description that Valenzuela had a “permanent influence on Dodgers history” and “radically altered the country’s cultural and sporting landscape,” but the author falls short on the jacket hype of Valenzuela’s “bringing redemption to the organization’s controversial beginnings in L.A.” Of disappointment to some readers, there is no effort to marshal the work of sociology experts to provide deeper insight on this overall topic or greater validation of the redemption thesis.
Besides filling the longstanding market void for a Valenzuela biography, Sherman is to be commended for integrating societal-impact elements as well as for addressing character assessment to enhance Valenzuela’s obvious baseball-industry impact. The biography portion is highly focused on Valenzuela’s Cinderella 1981 season (14 of the book’s 25 chapters), when the first-year pitcher with “his signature eyes-to-the-sky delivery and devastating screwball” (4) copped the Rookie of the Year Award and Cy Young Award while leading the Dodgers to World Series victory. However, the remaining baseball-season chapters are rather lackluster and there is no significant look at Valenzuela’s post-baseball life other than isolated references to his gig as Spanish-language radio broadcaster for the Dodgers. The overall Bevis Rating for this biography is L5C3R2.
The book’s shortcomings primarily result from Sherman’s heavy reliance on interviews with ballplayers and other people in the baseball industry as the predominant research evidence.
The key interviews were conducted with Jaime Jarrin (Valenzuela’s radio partner and translator of his Spanish-spoken thoughts to the American media), Mark Langill (Dodgers team historian and former publicist as publications director), and a multitude of former ballplayers. As sports acquaintances, they have bias in a positive way toward Valenzuela and are thus unreliable in their objectivity. Not surprisingly, character assessment is a consensus “quiet and polite” (65) or “shy and reclusive” (125) and other similar generic phraseology.
Sherman is geared to using his interviewing skills honed in traditional sportswriting and modern-day podcasting rather than the document and archive techniques emphasized by a historian. Interviewing is Sherman’s expertise, though, and it seems to sell books, as he has eight books to his credit, including most recently Two Sides of Glory: The 1986 Boston Red Sox in Their Own Words (Nebraska, 2021). This is the classic quandary for biographer and publisher – the sometimes inherent conflict between commercial element (book sales) and intellectual inquiry (exposing the soul of the subject). Sherman, a story teller, is somewhat reminiscent of 1980s baseball biographer Maury Allen, who was the master of the hero-worshipping ballplayer biography. Allen’s books sold well, but readers didn’t learn much, if anything, about the character of the player. The same result may well hold true for this latest book by Sherman.
In fairness to Sherman, he had the same impossible task to undertake with the biography aspects of the Valenzuela book as did Jane Leavy two decades ago with her project to comprehend another reclusive Dodgers left-handed pitcher in her book Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. Both writers faced the conundrum of writing a biography of a non-publicity-seeking celebrity athlete who not only declined to be interviewed but also steadfastly was unsupportive of any effort to have a biography written about him. Sherman didn’t come close to meeting the Leavy standard, though. As a writer with a bent toward investigation, Leavy crafted not only a broad-based look at Koufax’s impact to a variety of societal changes, but also created a fairly nuanced character assessment that Koufax’s pullback from public life (and resultant branding as a recluse) resulted from his deeper moral boundaries than most celebrity athletes.
Daybreak at Chavez Ravine enhances the general sociological knowledge about the expansion of the Mexican-American audience for Los Angeles Dodgers baseball, while providing a glimpse into the personality of pitcher Fernando Valenzuela within its highly baseball-focused biographical sections. The door remains wide open, though, for a full-fledged biography that provides a more in-depth assessment of Valenzuela’s character and analysis of his post-baseball life.
Bevis Baseball Research 