LA actor recalls Fernando Valenzuela's impact on Dodgers culture after stadium forced mass evictions on locals

Actor Danny Trejo talks to Fox News Digital about the impact of Fernando Valenzuela on the Dogers and the city of Los Angeles.

Sixty-two-year-old Dodger Stadium will host the World Series starting on Friday, but it will be a bittersweet day for fans, hosting the first Dodger game since the death of franchise icon Fernando Valenzuela.

Valenzuela died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of just 62. As a six-time All Star and World Series champion with the Dodgers in 1981, Valenzuela was also a cultural icon to the local Los Angeles-based Dodger fans, who embraced the team after it moved from Brooklyn in 1958. 

Hollywood actor Danny Trejo, a lifelong Los Angeles local, remembers the day the Dodgers came to his hometown. He was just 14 years old when they began their inaugural season in the City of Angels. He remembers the grueling and controversial process that got the franchise its $23 million stadium built in the Chavez Ravine.

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A composite picture of Dodgers Stadium (proposed), on March 13, 1958. (Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty Images)

"When the Dodgers first came to L.A. there was a big controversy about them moving people out," Trejo told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. 

The land used for Dodger Stadium in the 1950s had previously been seized from local owners and inhabitants in the early 1950s by the city of Los Angeles, using eminent domain with funds from the federal Housing Act of 1949. 

It meant that any of the local residents who lived there had to accept a payout from the city to leave their property. Eminent domain gave the city the power to take private property for public use. It is a right that is only reserved by the