The most surprising Silver Slugger winner in Los Angeles Dodgers history

If you ask a Dodgers fan to list Fernando Valenzuela’s defining traits, you’ll get the same reel every time: the skyward eyes, the hypnotic pause, and that screwball that made All-Stars look like they were guessing in the dark. You probably won’t hear “bat-to-ball menace.” That’s exactly why his pair of Silver Sluggers still lands as a double-take. “Fernando the pitcher” was a global phenomenon; “Fernando the hitter” was a quirk of the pre-DH National League, a subplot that somehow ended up with hardware.

The surprise isn’t that a pitcher once won a hitting award; plenty did in the 1980s when hurlers still stepped into the box. The surprise is that this pitcher won it twice, in 1981 and again in 1983, despite surface numbers that would make a modern hitting coach reach for the iPad. Valenzuela wasn’t a thumper. He wasn’t even a table-setter. He was, however, just productive enough, just often enough, in a league where the bar for pitcher offense hovered barely above “sacrifice bunt and survive.”

Fernando Valenzuela’s unlikely Dodgers Silver Slugger story still defies belief decades later

Look at the lines and you’ll see how odd the trophy looks on the shelf. In 1981, Valenzuela hit .250/.262/.281 with 0 home runs and 7 RBI, respectable for a pitcher, but hardly the stuff of silver-plated legend. Two years later he won again while hitting just .187/.194/.253 with one homer and nine RBI. That 1983 nod is the real eyebrow-raiser: the voting essentially said, “Among pitchers, he did the most with the least,” a reminder that the Silver Slugger at that spot was about relative value, not absolute thunder.

Context matters, and it tilts the scales toward Valenzuela’s surprise factor. He won the 1981 award amid Fernandomania, a rookie season in which he also pocketed the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year, moments when everything he touched felt mythic.

The bat, though, was myth-adjacent at best. His offensive game was unorthodox, more knife-fight than showcase, sprinkling contact, the occasional well-timed poke, and functional bunts. In a pool of weak-hitting peers, that could be enough.

By 1983, his plate results dipped, yet he still outpaced the pitcher class, even overshadowing teammate Jerry Reuss, whose numbers arguably looked cleaner. That inconsistency underscores how squishy the standards were for voting on pitcher offense in the pre-DH NL.

You can make comparisons to frame the surprise. Tim Leary won in 1988 while hitting .269, which on paper beats Fernando’s .250 in 1981. And Orel Hershiser had stretches where he handled the bat better than a casual fan might remember. But that’s the point: many pitcher winners were stealth-competent with the stick. Valenzuela’s case is different, his legend lived on the mound, and his Silver Sluggers feel like cameos that somehow won Oscars. Twice.

Honorable mention: the Dodgers’ list of Silver Slugger winners is a franchise-history flex, a position player like Steve Sax (1986), a table-setter not known for power. But in a club this decorated, “surprising” is relative. Valenzuela still wears the crown because his bat never defined him, and yet, for two seasons, it still brought home silver.