Since Rolando’s first fall in February of 2022 (a few days before the Rams-Bengals Super Bowl in Los Angeles) it felt like a yearly February pilgrimage to the hospital. It seemed like he was always stricken with some severe medical issue every February. February ’22 it was a Cardiac episode, February ’23 it was a combination of Spinal Stenosis and what they deemed was a small stroke. After those two years, I felt mostly prepared for the inevitable.

He’d begun to shrink a little more, get excited less or actually, happy less, excited not at all. His steps were more laborious and the sound of him getting up from bed was difficult to hear. He didn’t do the dishes after I’d cooked a solid Rolando Eats meal and I physically needed to help him undress and get into the shower. Mostly little things not noticeable to someone not intimately familiar with the day-to-day minutiae of living with an elderly parent. Eating less at every meal, showering or bathing less, not answering questions during Jeopardy when you know he knew the answer. Rolando was slowing down.

So, in the first week of February 2024, when he screamed in pain in the bathroom, it initiated his yearly Winter trip to the hospital. This time it was Blood Clots.

********

Baseball is a family sport. Fathers and son, mothers and daughters. A catch in the backyard, a game at the park with family and friends. Baseball is tradition. Yankees- Red Sox, Dodgers-Giants but every fan base has their own rivalries and traditions be it the Padres, Braves, Rangers or any team.

Though I was raised in Oklahoma and, mostly, in Ohio, we were a Dodger family. My dad listened to the Dodgers on the radio in the early 40s in Aguascalientes, Mexico and created a lifelong rivalry with his older brother, a Yankee fan. Now, in those days, the radio play-by-play was often a time delay. Imagine this: no television, no cable, no streaming and the only radio play of a game was twelve-hours after the fact. And it would play a couple of times. Rolando told me the story of how he’d hoodwink his older brother, Cuahtemoc (who we will refer to as Uncle Pete), by listening to the game first and then bet his unsuspecting brother the outcome and then they’d listen to it together (Rolando for the second time). What a stinker. Uncle Pete never caught on.

After Rolando came to the U.S., the Brooklyn Dodgers moved from New York to Los Angeles. He’d only been in the country 4-5 years, so the move wasn’t devastating to him. And so, after marrying and starting a family, we became a Dodger family, no matter where we lived. I barely remember the Dodger-Yankee World Series’ of the 70s but I had already developed a love for baseball. This love would become entrenched with Fernandomania.

Oklahoma and Ohio are not hot spots for Mexican- American culture. The only Mexican food I ate growing up was made at home; ‘Mexican’ restaurants in Bowling Green, Ohio were not creators of Mexican food. I didn’t really realize it at the time, my mother was Anglo, but I was a little different from my friends. For the most part, I wasn’t picked on for my heritage (my lisp and stutter took care of that) but withstood the occasional spic or wetback comment. Being a young kid, I didn’t understand what any of that meant. But I did have a connection with Fernando Valenzuela.

A twenty-year-old kid from Etchohuaquila, Sonora, Mexico (just rolls off the tongue), Fernando took baseball and America by storm in the Spring of 1981. He won his first eight starts, throwing seven complete games and five shutouts. If a starting pitcher did that today, they’d probably name him commissioner. He was a phenom and a phenomenon. A Mexican kid in America’s pastime, he was the dawning of a new age in American sports. And he played for MY team.

As my family did every year, we loaded up our ugly Pinto Station Wagon and drove south from Bowling Green to Cincinnati to see the Reds play the Dodgers. It was the NBC Saturday Game of the Week and the starting pitcher would be Fernando. We were not a wealthy family, by any means, and this yearly trip was special and without me knowing, very rough on the Andrade expense account. So, to not only get tickets to see the Dodgers against their then biggest rivals, The Big Red Machine, and to have Fernando start that game was a collection of luck to the infinitesimal decimal point.

May 23rd, 1981.

It was not a good performance by Fernando. He didn’t lose the game, but it was his first no decision. In the fifth inning, after the Reds loaded the bases, a rookie catcher, Mike Scioscia (who spoke no Espanol) went to the mound to huddle with Fernando and discuss the situation with the Reds pitcher, Mario Soto, batting. Fernando, speaking no English, misunderstood his assignment. As Soto bunted, Fernando proceeded to throw the ball to the wrong base and three runs scored, seemingly dooming the Dodgers. BUT, the Dodgers came back. Steve Garvey and Ron Cey hit home runs in the eighth inning and Dave Stewart got the win in relief, as the Dodgers won 9-6 in ten innings.

A few months later, Fernando helped the Dodgers defeat the Yankees in six games to win the World Series.

I cut out a picture of Fernando from that Reds game, out of the Bowling Green Sentinel Tribune newspaper, framed it and hung it on the wall in my bedroom and there it rested until I moved to California in 1999. Fernando was my sports hero growing up. He didn’t look like me, he didn’t speak like me, but he spoke to me.

*******

On February 26th, 2024, we got Rolando out of the hospital rehab where he’d been for a month. He had developed blood clots in his lungs, his legs and had a massive one in his forearm that created all of the pain. He would require 24-hour care now, my 91-year-old dad. I took time off of work to watch him, but I needed help. We had some very good in-house care givers who watched him when I could not. However, his cognitive skills were slowly returning, and it felt like he might make it, long-term.

The next week, Rolando and I sat down and watched the first Spring Training game of the year, on the Dodger channel. It was the beginning of an exciting year. The studio interviewed the newest Dodger, Shohei Ohtani and followed that with a Spanish interview of Dodger legend, Fernando Valenzuela, now a long-time Dodger announcer.

It was March 3rd and we had a special baseball season ahead of us.

*******

This is the first of a series I will be presenting titled, Fernando, Freddie, Rolando and Me. It will cover 2024 and the relationship between baseball and my dad.

Also, I am proud to announce that we will announcing the release date, soon, of my first novel, Ten to the 405. Stay tuned!