Did Chicanos really hate the Dodgers before Fernando?

There's not much numerical evidence for a popular media myth.

It’s a common media myth that Los Angeles Latinos didn’t like the Dodgers until Fernando Valenzuela’s miracle year of 1981. For example, in the Washington Post:

Fernando Valenzuela was a trailblazer for Latinos — and all of baseball

By León Krauze

October 23, 2024 at 2:01 p.m. EDT

Fernando Valenzuela was my childhood idol. Like many Mexican kids of my generation, I grew up watching him pitch, mesmerized by his calm demeanor and his peculiar windup: gazing skyward before delivering an indecipherable screwball.

In 1981, my father promised me a trip to Los Angeles to see Valenzuela in person if I earned good grades. Against all odds, we made it to Dodger Stadium. The entire place seemed to reverberate with Fernando’s name.

… His success resonated deeply with the Hispanic community in Los Angeles, bridging a divide between the Dodgers and Latino fans, many of whom still remembered the painful evictions decades earlier for the construction of Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine.

The back story on this is that Chavez Ravine was a hillside Mexican favela above downtown Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, progressives had the slum condemned and virtually all residents cleared off so they could build a Cabrini-Green-style public housing project there with two dozen 13-story modernist towers.

Then Los Angeles voters rebelled and banned huge housing projects like that. So the city now had an empty piece of land on its hands, with just a tiny number of residents still holed up on it. It offered it to various developers but there wasn’t much interest in it.

Then Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers offered to take it off the city’s hands for a small consideration and build Dodger Stadium on it with his own money (and own the stadium).

By subsequent standards of sports owner hardball, that was a pretty good deal for the city, but in the more innocent 1950s, the deal raised hackles. So it was put to a referendum in 1958 … and passed. A very small number of Mexicans still on the land were then hauled away, but the great majority of the evictions had happened years earlier under progressives.

Dodger Stadium opened in 1962 and immediately proved wildly popular with the populace.

As the O’Malleys prospered and the Los Angeles Times moved left over the course of the Sixties, the story got frequently revived to serve as a sort of origin myth for the Brown Power movement of Chicano activists. But there was never much evidence that the Mexican masses in L.A. cared. The modern take that Mexicans were boycotting Dodger stadium until Fernando in 1981 is silly: when I went to Dodger games in the 1970s, there plenty of Mexicans in attendance. Mexicans loved their hometown team before Fernando.

I don’t have any data on the demographics of Dodger crowds over time, but the Dodgers had been a popular franchise for a long time: