Danny Jackson

Hard-throwing lefty Danny Jackson’s career was checkered with occasional brilliance and bids to recapture his glory days. He pitched in three World Series for three different teams and made history in 1985 by striking out the side on nine pitches for the Fall Classic’s first and only immaculate inning. Playing in parts of 15 major-league seasons from 1983 through 1997, Jackson peaked in 1988 with the Cincinnati Reds. He posted a 23-8 record and 2.73 ERA and was runner-up for the National League Cy Young Award.

Jackson’s signature late-breaking movement on his pitches perplexed both batters and catchers. “He had a nasty slider, and I loved pitching the right-handers down and in. It’s breaking at their ankles, and they’re fouling it off their foot,” said former catcher Don Slaught, who handled Jackson with the Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates. “I really thought he was going to be a superstar when I first saw him,” Slaught remembered.1

Danny Lynn Jackson was born on January 5, 1962, in San Antonio, Texas. He was the second of Jerry and Marilyn (Stefanski) Jackson’s four children. Jerry played baseball in high school as an aspiring veterinarian but wound up in the hospitality business. He taught Danny to pitch at eight years old.2 Marilyn was a bank teller.3 The family moved west and settled in Aurora, Colorado, where Danny threw a pair of no-hitters and cracked a grand slam in a Little League district tournament at age 12 in 1974.4

Athleticism ran in the family; Danny’s older brother Mike was drafted by the NBA’s Kansas City Kings, but a knee injury prevented him from ever making it to the pros. Danny felt overshadowed by Mike’s sports accomplishments, especially when asked by peers, “How come you’re not as good as your brother?”5 It’s what drove him to make his mark in baseball. He also played basketball and was a linebacker on the football team.

As a freshman at Aurora Central High School, Danny had good velocity on his fastball but no off-speed pitches, and he wasn’t throwing strikes. “We got him pretty well straightened out by the beginning of his junior year,” said Tim Scheibeler, the school’s former pitching coach.6 Jackson became comfortable throwing a slurve and came into his own in a game against crosstown rival Hinkley High and its ace, Brian Fisher, a 6-foot-3 righty. Fisher already threw a 92-mile-per-hour fastball and had captured the attention of the city and pro scouts.7

When those same scouts saw Jackson pitch, “They were all over him and his parents after the game,” Scheibeler recalled.8 “That’s where Danny started to realize that ‘gee, maybe I’m pretty good.’”

After graduating in 1980 Jackson was drafted by the Oakland A’s but didn’t sign. “I was a 24th-round pick, and about all they offered me was a plane ticket to spring training,” he recalled in 1985. “I said, ‘Forget it.’”9

Jackson developed his slider at the University of Oklahoma in 1981 with the help of his roommate, Sooners ace Ray Hayward, who went on to play for the San Diego Padres and Texas Rangers. Hayward encouraged him to throw it harder. “I struck out a lot of people in college with it,” said Jackson,10 who threw the slider on a two-strike count or when his fastball lacked oomph. Jackson went 6-2 and posted a 3.71 ERA in his one year at OU before transferring to Trinidad State Junior College in Aurora ahead of the next pro draft.

Part of Jackson’s motivation to turn pro stemmed from legal trouble in which he had landed some years earlier. According to the Kansas City Times, when Jackson was 16, he and a friend were speeding while under the influence when Jackson’s car collided with another vehicle.11 The other driver sued for $15,000, and Jackson leveraged baseball as the means to bail out his parents for his teenage indiscretions.12 If baseball didn’t work out, he was ready to become an architect.13

The Kansas City Royals selected Jackson first overall in the January 1982 secondary draft. They agreed to a contract that included a $55,000 signing bonus.14 On April 9, Jackson threw five scoreless innings in his professional debut for the Single-A Charleston Royals.15 He picked up the win and won nine more starts at Charleston before being quickly promoted to Double-A Jacksonville, where he won seven more games to finish his first pro season with an overall 17-3 record and 2.50 ERA.

During the offseason, Jackson took a roofing job that could be treacherous on wintry mornings. He once said that he accidentally slid down frost-covered roofs “hundreds of times.”16

Buzz was building in Kansas City about Jackson, but Royals manager Dick Howser wasn’t about to make any rash call-ups. Howser had been down this road as Yankees manager in 1980, as clamor grew in New York for 21-year-old pitcher Dave Righetti to be brought up. Like Howser’s pitching staff then, the Royals’ rotation heading into 1983 was replete with veterans like Vida Blue, Larry Gura, Steve Renko, and Paul Splittorff.17 “I wouldn’t hesitate to give Jackson the ball … but we’re not in that position to have to,” Howser said.18 The Royals sent Jackson to Triple-A Omaha at the end of March.

Once the major-league rosters expanded on September 1, the 6-foot, 190-pound Jackson was called up. He made his first big-league appearance in Minnesota on September 11, 1983, entering in the sixth and holding Twins batters to a single and a walk over three scoreless innings. Jackson struck out Kent Hrbek looking, the first of five strikeouts in his debut. Willie Aikens’s two-run homer for Kansas City in the top of the ninth broke a 1–1 tie and gave Jackson the win.

“His stuff was off the charts because his ball moved so much,” said longtime Royals catcher John Wathan, who caught Jackson’s debut and 21 more of his appearances.19 Batters struggled to barrel up the ball. Catchers put down a sign but didn’t know what to expect. “He was really hard to catch sometimes,” Wathan said, “because you just didn’t know which way [his fastball] was gonna dive or sink or sail.”20

Jackson made his first start on September 19, 1983, the same day he met his future wife, Barbara Jolene “Jody” Canino, at a Kansas City shoe store. That night at Royals Stadium, in the second game of a doubleheader, the California Angels tagged Jackson for 11 hits and five earned runs over six innings. Yet he received no decision as the Royals rallied late to win 7–6. Jackson and Canino were married four months later and had four children.

The Royals’ rotation took on a more youthful look in 1984 with Jackson and the additions of right-handed starters Mark Gubicza and Bret Saberhagen. At 22, Jackson was the oldest of the three prized rookies. A quick-working rhythm pitcher, his repertoire consisted of his slider, a cutter, a sinker, and a seldom-used three-finger changeup that he learned from left-handed Baltimore Orioles reliever Tippy Martinez, another Aurora native. As a short reliever, Martinez relied mostly on gas just as Jackson did as a starter.

“He could throw hard, and his slider looked like a Ron Guidry type of slider, so he didn’t need to do anything else,” said Martinez, who nevertheless suggested that Jackson add to his arsenal.21 “I was talking to Fergie Jenkins about his changeup, and he taught me how he held it and what it did. So, I just kind of passed that along to Danny,” Martinez recalled. Jackson was a quick study but kept the changeup in reserve and wouldn’t use it as long as his slider and fastball were working.

His right leg bore the brunt of his weight with each pitch, as his left knee grazed the mound on his follow-through. “His center of balance never does pass in front of the right leg, thus there is no need to throw the trailing leg to compensate,”22 Bill James wrote in describing Jackson’s peculiar delivery, one that he had back in high school. “It was being taught everywhere,” Scheibeler remembered.23

“[Jackson] was out of the drop-and-drive era, and he and Mark Gubicza had to use kneepads on their drive leg,” said Jim Sundberg, the six-time Gold Glove catcher who joined the Royals in 1985 to guide the young pitching staff.24 Like Wathan, Sundberg had to get used to the movement of Jackson’s pitches. “He was the most difficult normal pitcher for me to catch,” Sundberg said.25 “I caught Charlie Hough, a knuckleballer—he was the hardest to catch—but Danny, his ball was explosive.”

To help counterbalance the late tail life on Jackson’s inside pitch to righties and catch it effectively, Sundberg made an adjustment when setting up behind the plate: he rotated his left thumb counterclockwise to a 30-degree angle inside his mitt. “It actually made me a better catcher in receiving the ball, and that was after I had won Gold Gloves,” he said.26

Jackson was tightly wound—“a fiery guy, a competitor on the mound. You could see it every time he went out there, that all he wanted to do was to win, and in the worst way,” Wathan said.27 “It was funny, because he was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde … on the mound, he was like a different guy. He kicked it into another gear.” Royals starter Bud Black once said about Jackson, “It’s frightening to watch a guy get as mad as he does.”28

The mercurial Jackson’s temper earned him the nickname of “Jason,” after the Friday the 13th character. After getting roughed up in one outing, he broke his Walkman—on which he played Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” again and again to get psyched up for starts.29 Another time, he hurled a laundry hamper toward a clubhouse assistant who was making small talk with him before he pitched.30 Jackson still wears the scar from when he, fed up with teammates’ grumbling, head-butted the overhead luggage rack on the team bus.31

But despite his impulses, Jackson could concentrate deeply on the mound, tuning out crowd noise. In 1985 he went 14-12 with a 3.42 ERA and averaged the fewest home runs per nine innings (HR/9) of any American League pitcher, yielding just seven in 208 innings. He kept his ERA to an impressive 1.04 in four postseason appearances (26 innings) that year and went the distance in two elimination games.

His two complete games were a boost when Kansas City needed it the most. Jackson’s turn in the rotation came when the Royals had fallen behind three games to one in both the ALCS and World Series. His eight-hit shutout of Toronto on October 13 helped the Royals win the pennant. Then, on October 24 in Game Five of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, Jackson kept the Royals alive with a five-hitter. Three nights later, they became just the fifth team (of six, through 2025) to rally from a 3–1 Series deficit and capture the trophy. “We would not have won without Danny,” Sundberg said.32

Jackson’s commanding Game Five performance featured an immaculate inning in the seventh against the bottom of the Cardinals’ order. He struck out third baseman Terry Pendleton swinging, fanned catcher Tom Nieto looking, and got pinch-hitter Brian Harper to chase a pitch inside for strike three. Had George Brett caught Pendleton’s first-pitch pop foul on his famous slide into the Royals dugout, Jackson wouldn’t be in the record books.

He almost made history again on October 1, 1986, but the Angels’ Dick Schofield’s fly-ball single to right dashed Jackson’s hopes for a no-hitter in the ninth. “All year long, it’s been one bad break after another,” Jackson said afterward, an allusion to an 11-12 season plagued by poor run support (his 3.20 ERA was the fifth-lowest in the league).33 Those frustrations mounted in 1987, as Jackson absorbed a 9-18 record despite having the lowest HR/9 rate in the game. Royals hitters averaged just two runs in his losses.

When Pete Rose phoned with word that he was being traded to Cincinnati, Jackson was flooded with the same feelings of relief he experienced when his first child was born.34 On November 6, 1987, Jackson and shortstop Argenis “Angel” Salazar were traded to the Reds for infielder Kurt Stillwell and right-handed starter Ted Power, under the leery eye of Reds owner Marge Schott. “Stillwell and Power were two of Marge’s favorite players, and when we made that deal she said, ‘It better work out,’” recalled Murray Cook, who finalized the trade 25 days into his tenure as Reds general manager.35

It did work out—at least in the beginning. Jackson’s 23 wins (with a league-leading 15 complete games) in 1988 were the most for a Cincinnati pitcher since Jim Maloney’s 23 in 1963. The last pitcher before Jackson to have such divergent won-lost records while changing teams was Jerry Koosman, who went 20-13 with Minnesota in 1979 following a 3-15 season with the Mets.36 Jackson was chosen for the NL All-Star team—the Midsummer Classic was being hosted in Cincinnati—but did not enter the game.

After going 6-1 in August with a 2.23 ERA in eight starts, Jackson was named the NL Pitcher of the Month. That year, he threw a career-high six shutouts. “Shoulda won the Cy Young, in my opinion,” Cook said.37 Jackson finished second in voting to the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser, whom he equaled in complete games that year (15, the most in the majors). But Hershiser was unhittable down the stretch; in his last seven starts of the season, he went 6-0 and pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings.

Jackson could not duplicate his performance the following year. His pitches were breaking earlier and tipping off hitters,38 and three bone spurs in his left big toe affected his mechanics. At first, Jackson thought he could play through it, but the pain when pushing off the pitching rubber was too much to bear. He lost eight of 12 starts to begin the 1989 season, and his ERA ballooned to 6.16 by the end of May.

Changes to Jackson’s throwing motion led to shoulder issues and a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome. He went on the DL with capsulitis in his pitching shoulder; on July 31, he underwent season-ending arthroscopic shoulder surgery to trim frayed tissue. In 20 starts that year Jackson had gone 6-11 with a 5.60 ERA. Schott was reportedly furious with new Reds GM Bob Quinn after Jackson re-signed for 1990 without taking a pay cut.39

New manager Lou Piniella penciled Jackson into the rotation as his fourth starter behind finesse lefty Tom Browning and right-handers José Rijo and Jack Armstrong. Piniella’s pitching coach was Stan Williams, a tall flamethrower in the Dodgers’ rotation during the Koufax–Drysdale era. Nicknamed “Steamer,” his reputation as a brushback pitcher extended to modern-day batting practice if any Reds player dared hit off him.40 Still, Jackson was undaunted in snapping at Williams when the coach paid him mound visits.41

Second-year catcher Joe Oliver was behind the plate for 13 of Jackson’s starts42 in 1990. “Danny was not afraid to come right at hitters. He was known for breaking bats, guys not squaring the ball up very well on their barrels,” Oliver said.43 “He would probably break three or four bats a game, and it wasn’t typically just a little crack; it was usually breaking them in half.”

On July 17, Jackson was 3-0 with a 2.04 ERA in his last six starts when he felt stiffness in his shoulder. “You could just see that he wasn’t letting it come out of his hand as easy and as free. He was tighter,” Oliver remembered.44 The Reds announced a partially torn rotator cuff, but Jackson self-diagnosed the issue as torn adhesions.45 He returned to the Reds rotation on August 30. “[Converted reliever] Norm Charlton stepped in and ate up a lot of innings until he came back,” Oliver said.46

The Reds persevered through injuries and other setbacks47 to lead the NL West wire to wire in 1990. Jackson made two starts against the East champion Pirates in the NLCS. His shaky location was good enough for the win in Game Three, and he held the Bucs to one hit over six innings in the Reds’ pennant-clinching Game Six.

Next came the World Series against the odds-on favorite Oakland Athletics. The A’s chased Jackson in the third inning of Game Two after he surrendered four runs. Cincinnati came back to win in 10 with Oliver’s heroics, though, and went on to stun the A’s in a four-game series sweep—quieting Oakland’s bats to a team average of just .207.

On November 21, 1990, free agent Jackson signed a four-year, $10.5 million contract with the Chicago Cubs. “In the past, Danny had expressed an interest in going elsewhere,” Reds center fielder Eric Davis said after the deal was reported.48 Jackson said Wrigley Field’s preponderance of day games was alluring because it would allow evening family time to “go to dinner or the movies like a normal person.”49

Jackson’s beginnings in Chicago were marred by two first-half stints on the DL for groin and abdominal injuries. “Danny was in the trainer’s room quite a bit,” said Jim Essian, the former major-league catcher who managed the Cubs for most of the 1991 season.50 When Jackson did pitch, he wasn’t effective; his WHIP reached nearly 2.00 that year, and he averaged six walks per nine innings.

“This is a four-year deal,” Jackson’s inner circle kept reminding him, to assuage his guilt from not living up to expectations.51 He tried to carefully pitch around his injuries, making adjustments to his delivery that took him even more off his game.52 “It seemed to me, in my short time with Danny, that he was under the gun a little bit,” Essian said.53 “He was hurt. He wasn’t contributing. He had the big contract.”

Between April 9, 1991, and May 31, 1992, Jackson made 25 starts as a Cub and won just one. He was traded to Pittsburgh for third baseman Steve Buechele on July 10, one and a half years into his four-year Cubs deal.

Jackson went 4-4 in 15 starts for the Pirates and issued fewer walks. He pitched in his third LCS against Atlanta but was knocked out in the Braves’ four-run second inning of Game Two on October 7. Jackson did not make another start in the series, which Pittsburgh lost in seven games.

Toward the end of the season, Phillies general manager Lee Thomas had seen something in Jackson as the left-hander pitched at Veterans Stadium. Thomas mobilized baseball’s two new teams, the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies, to pick Jackson in the November expansion draft so that the Phillies could then immediately trade for him.54 Selected by the Marlins in the final round, Jackson was off to Philadelphia, where he underwent a career resurgence, notching double-digits in the win column over the next two seasons.

Jackson worked in and out of trouble in Game Four of the 1993 NLCS, when he stranded eight Braves baserunners and allowed just one run in 7 2/3 innings for the win. A career .126 right-handed hitter, he got his first postseason hit by singling in a go-ahead run off John Smoltz in the fourth.

In Jackson’s 57 1/3 career postseason innings, he allowed just two home runs; each came in the World Series. The first was hit by Oakland’s José Canseco in 1990. The other was Paul Molitor’s solo shot in Game Three of the 1993 Series against Toronto. Jackson took the loss in that game after giving up four runs in five innings. The Blue Jays won the Series on Joe Carter’s famous home run in Game Six.

Jackson went 14-6 for the Phillies in strike-shortened 1994, his most wins since his sensational 1988 season in Cincinnati. He was chosen for the All-Star Game and pitched in the seventh inning, entering with two men on and one out, but was lifted after giving up a hit to each of the three batters he faced. The National League won, 8–7.

On December 12, Jackson signed a three-year, $10.8 million deal with the Cardinals. The club was known for its thriftiness, but pitching—the team’s ERA was sixth-highest in the majors in 1994—and defense had become top priorities. The Cardinals turned to the man who’d broken the hearts of St. Louisans everywhere in 1985, when the club was just one win away from a World Series championship.

The signing took place even though Jackson’s physical exam had revealed a three-centimeter-wide lump on his thyroid. It was later found to be cancerous. Jackson underwent a thyroidectomy, and he was treated with a course of radiation and a daily pill. He was told that it was a lower-grade cancer that had not spread.55 However, after losing his first seven decisions of 1995 and running out of gas three innings into his starts, Jackson sought answers for his exhaustion and rubbery knees.

He traveled to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital and learned that too high a dosage of his medication was to blame.56 Although he fired a four-hit shutout on July 7, he never fully returned to form. In early August, he severely injured his ankle on the basepaths when he thought better of stretching a double into a triple and slowed up. He made one more start but then had surgery to repair the ankle. It lasted six hours and sidelined Jackson for most of 1996.57

On October 14, Jackson became the first player to appear in a League Championship Series with five different teams by pitching for the Cardinals in Game Five of the NLCS. In three innings of relief, he gave up seven hits and three runs in a 14–0 loss to the Braves, who came back from a 3–1 series deficit to take the pennant in seven games.

An injury to his rib cage delayed the start to Jackson’s 1997 season. He returned to the mound on May 20 and threw a three-hitter over 6 1/3 innings, but in his next three outings allowed a total of 16 runs. The San Diego Padres acquired the 35-year-old in a multi-player deal on June 13. Conceivably he might have earned a more lucrative new contract with a bullpen assignment in San Diego. But instead, Jackson retired on August 10. He’d gone 5-22 in his last three seasons. “The arm slowed down … it didn’t come through with the same force it used to,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune.58

In 2,072 2/3 major-league innings, Jackson compiled a 112-131 record and a 4.01 ERA. He threw 44 complete games and 15 shutouts, and collected one save in his 30 career relief appearances. Only twice in Jackson’s career was his strikeout-to-walk ratio above 2.0: his All-Star seasons of 1988 (2.27) and 1994 (2.80). One notable plus, though, was how well he kept the ball in the park: he allowed a home run for every 15.6 innings pitched.

In November 1997, the grand opening was held for a 65,000-square-foot entertainment complex that Jackson co-owned in Overland Park, Kansas. Called Incred-A-Bowl, it boasted 40 bowling lanes, a video arcade, and full-service restaurant. Bowling had long been a passion of Jackson’s. He took his wife to the Lucky Strike Lanes on their first date and was a league bowler in the baseball offseason, adopting a right-handed armswing when he hurt his left shoulder with the Reds. Jackson’s father Jerry, a member of the bowling club in high school, became the business’s general manager.

For part of 2004, Jackson served as pitching coach for the Kansas City T-Bones, a pro team in the independent Northern League, but gave it up when the commitment became too much for a father with school-age children.59 His Incred-A-Bowl Fun Center closed in 2015, following bankruptcy proceedings and attempts to sell the business.60

Jackson and his wife Jody live in Overland Park. Before the Royals game on May 16, 2025, Jackson threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Sundberg as part of the team’s 40th anniversary celebration of its World Series win. He remains the only pitcher to have ever thrown an immaculate inning in postseason play.

Last revised: July 15, 2026

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Murray Cook, Jim Essian, Ray Hayward, Tippy Martinez, Joe Oliver, Tim Scheibeler, Don Slaught, Jim Sundberg, and John Wathan for their memories. Thanks also to Peter Coolbaugh, Orton Ortwein, Eric Petersen, Andrew Stern, Bill Stetka, Erick Swanson, and Mike Zielinski for their assistance.

This biography was reviewed by Rory Costello and Mike Eisenbath and fact-checked by Henry Kirn.

Photo credit: Danny Jackson, Trading Card Database.

Sources

The author relied on Baseball-Reference.com for statistics and obtained Jackson’s player file from the library and archives at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. All other sources are shown in the Notes.

Notes

1 Don Slaught, interview with author, April 28, 2026.

2 Norm Clarke, “Trade Was Turning Point for Jackson,” Rocky Mountain News, September 25, 1988: 27-S. Also, 1958 Yo-Hi Annual (Yokohama American High School), 32.

3 Polk’s San Antonio (Bexar County, Texas) City Directory 1962, R.L. Polk & Co., 1963.

4 “All-Stars Take 3rd in Tourney,” Aurora Advocate Sentinel, July 31, 1974: 28.

5 Fred Pietila, “Jackson Brothers Bound for K.C.,” Rocky Mountain News, June 30, 1983: 92.

6 Tim Scheibeler, interview with author, April 6, 2026 (hereafter Scheibeler interview).

7 Fisher became a second-round pick by the Atlanta Braves and the first high school pitcher selected in the June 1980 draft. He went on to play parts of seven major-league seasons. He lost two of three Pirates-Reds games he started against Jackson in 1988; Jackson won their August 30 matchup and had no-decisions in the others.

8 Scheibeler interview.

9 Lloyd Herberg, “Last-Gasp Rally Keeps Royals Breathing,” Arizona Republic, October 27, 1985: D1.

10 Jim Benton, “Headed for Bigs? At 21, Jackson’s Pitching His Way to Royals Stadium,” Rocky Mountain News Sports PLUS, February 21, 1983: 12-S.

11 Mike Fish, “Sure Thing: Young Pitcher Has Can’t-Miss Tag After One Year in Pro Baseball,” Kansas City Times, February 26, 1983: G1.

12 Fish, “Sure Thing.” Also, Jackson, interview by Gregg Murphy, “Glove Stories with Murph,” YouTube, September 15, 2021, https://youtu.be/sqAnUm83iTQ.

13 Jackson, Murphy interview.

14 Fish, “Sure Thing.”

15 Richard Jablonski, “Royals Scuttle Pirates,” Charleston News and Courier, April 10, 1982: 1C.

16 Tim Sullivan, “Jackson Plays Only One Way—Full Out,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 27, 1989: C1.

17 Of the six Kansas City pitchers that made at least 14 starts in 1983, only two were under the age of 35.

18 Mike McKenzie, “Jackson Faces Battle to Start Season in KC,” Kansas City Star, March 27, 1983: 11.

19 Wathan, interview with author, April 10, 2026.

20 Wathan interview.

21 Martinez, interview with author, April 29, 2026.

22 Bill James, This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones (New York: Villard Books, 1989), 135.

23 Scheibeler interview.

24 Sundberg, interview with author, April 4, 2026.

25 Sundberg interview.

26 Sundberg interview.

27 Wathan interview.

28 Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo, Baseball Confidential (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 41.

29 Jeff Lenihan, “Reds Notebook: Cook Takes Attitude That Davis Will Be Fine,” Cincinnati Post, January 29, 1988: 3C.

30 Tim Sullivan, “Addition of Jackson Helps Staff,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 22, 1988: C1.

31 Jackson, Murphy interview.

32 Sundberg interview.

33 Bob Nightengale, “Jackson’s No-Hitter Ends in Ninth, but Royals Win,” Kansas City Times, October 2, 1986: D1.

34 “Baseball Talk,” Topps Baseball Talk Soundcard #107, LJN Toys, Ltd., 1989.

35 Cook, interview with author, February 20, 2026.

36 Seymour Siwoff and Steve Hirdt, et al., The 1993 Elias Baseball Analyst (New York: Fireside, 1993), 9.

37 Cook interview.

38 Michael Paolercio, “Jackson OK, Will Face Mets Thursday,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 4, 1989: C4.

39 Michael Paolercio, “Reds’ Actions Hint of Trading Jackson,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 25, 1990: C7. Jackson earned $1.15 million for his injury-shortened 1989 season and re-signed at the same amount for 1990.

40 Tom Browning and Dann Stupp, Tom Browning’s Tales from the Reds Dugout (Champaign, IL: Sports Publishing LLC, 2007), 119. Also, Jack Brennan, “Stan Is Pitchers’ Man,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 25, 1991: B1.

41 Michael Paolercio, “Game 3: Battle of Lefties,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 8, 1990: B4.

42 Unofficially, Oliver caught Jackson in 14 games in 1990. The first was on April 14 in Atlanta, a game erased from the record because it was rained out after the third inning. In that start—Jackson’s first since shoulder and toe surgery—he allowed seven hits and four runs. The Reds had a 9–4 lead when the game was called.

43 Oliver, interview with author, April 1, 2026.

44 Oliver interview.

45 Bill Koch, “Jackson Feels No Pain,” Cincinnati Post, August 3, 1990: 5C.

46 Oliver interview.

47 The Reds had gotten through 1990 with a banged-up rotation: Jackson spent three stints on the DL; Browning, who struggled at home—going 8-8 and giving up 66 earned runs in 20 starts—injured his left ankle in August; Rijo landed on the DL with tendinitis in his pitching shoulder; and Armstrong was sidelined with an inflamed right forearm. The Reds’ 125 home runs ranked slightly below the league average, and Eric Davis trudged through an injury-plagued first half; his batting average hovered in the .100s until mid-June.

48 Janet Graham, “Davis Says Reds Made Right Move,” Cincinnati Post, November 22, 1990: 2C.

49 Andrew Bagnato, “Cubs Take Chance on Jackson: Rich 4-Year Deal for Lefty,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1990, Section 4: 11.

50 Essian, interview with author, April 22, 2026.

51 Andrew Bagnato, “Guilt Hurt Cubs’ Jackson the Most,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 1991, Section 4: 3.

52 Kevin Roberts, “Painful Past Drives Pirates’ Jackson,” USA Today, July 21, 1992: 5C.

53 Essian interview.

54 Paul Hagen, “Jackson a Marlin, Then Phil,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 18, 1992: 88.

55 Rick Hummel, “Thyroid Cancer Sets Back Jackson’s Spring Training,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 7, 1995: 7D.

56 Rick Hummel, “Jackson Says Medication May Be Root of Problems,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 16, 1995: 5C.

57 Jackson pitched mostly out of the bullpen when he returned, but in a start on September 28 he took a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Reds. He retired the first 14 batters; then, the next man up reached on an infield error. Jackson set down the next four batters he faced, including a pinch-hitting Joe Oliver, before Cincinnati’s Hal Morris drove a single into left field. The game marked Jackson’s only win in 1996 and his 2,000th career inning.

58 Tom Krasovic, “Veteran Jackson Retires,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 11, 1997: D7.

59 Jeff Passan, “Finding Greatness,” Kansas City Star, April 3, 2005: G14.

60 “Heads Up: Bowling No More,” Kansas City Star, May 22, 2015: A8.