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On this day at Shea in 1965, as so often happened, Al Jackson lost. He didn’t pitch all that well in an 8-1 loss to St. Louis, but all the usual signs of an Alvin Neill Jackson start were there: He was facing the opposition’s ace (Bob Gibson) and his team had more errors than hits (4-3). Jackson was chased from the game after a boot by right fielder Johnny Lewis sent Ken Boyer and another runner around the bases. Ironically, batter and pitcher would be traded straight up that winter. Boyer, the former MVP with the fine baseball pedigree, was quite a haul from St. Louis in return for a pitcher who’d just completed his second 8-20 season since 1962. St. Louis still remembered the clinch-delaying, 1-0 shutout of Gibson that Jackson tossed during the final weekend of the Cards’ championship 1964 season.
Jackson died this week at the age of 83. He held seemingly every position in the organization except for manager and GM, and he probably could have done better than some of the jokers the Mets hired for those jobs in almost half century in blue and orange. “The little lefty from Waco, Texas,” as announcer Bob Murphy so often said, was selected by the Mets from the Pirates in the 1961 expansion draft with the team’s 11th—and best—pick in a forgettable day of transactions for the fledgling club.
Thank God for Al Jackson or those early Mets would have lost even more games! He threw the first shutout in team history in 1962, he threw the club’s first one-hitter later that year, and he gave the Mets their first win—and shutout—at Shea with an 8-0 blanking of the Buccos on April 18, 1964. Until Tom Seaver came along, Jackson’s 43-80 mark gave him the club record for wins and losses—the latter mark lasted a few years longer. (Jackson had winning records with his other three clubs, but all that did was help him barely avoid triple digit losses in his career: 67-99, 3.98 ERA in 1,389.1 innings.)
Jackson never even appeared on a World Series roster. He was stuck in the minors when the Pirates won the 1960 World Series. Jackson was left off the postseason roster by the eventual world champion Cardinals in 1967. The Mets, who got him back from St. Louis the day after the ’67 World Series ended, were youth powered as they galloped toward their own preposterously unlikely world championship in 1969. The Mets sold Jackson to the Reds in June of ’69 season—his last year in the majors.
But that was just the start of the story for Jackson and the Mets. He was the pitching coach for Don Zimmer’s Red Sox (1977-79), but his return to the Mets as a minor league coach was illuminating. In his first book, The Complete Game, not to mention during broadcasts, Ron Darling makes no bones about how much Jackson influenced and prepared the remarkable crop of pitchers coming up through the system in the 1980s for the rigors of the major league lineup, schedule, and life.
Jackson did such a good job in Tidewater, the Orioles swooped him up as pitching coach under Frank Robinson for Baltimore’s remarkable turnaround season in 1989. Jackson was back in the Shea bullpen in 2000 as Bobby Valentine’s bullpen coach—this time he was not left at home when his team marched into the World Series. This time his team lost, but Jackson knew a thing or two about tough defeats.
He remained with the club as a roving instructor, advisor, and ambassador, as part of the contingent that brought baseball to Guyana a few years ago. Jackson was too nice to say it, but I will. The Mets Hall of Fame (you may have forgotten about it, no one has been inducted in six years) should have Al Jackson in it—even as an associate member. Little Al did plenty to earn inclusion. He was a Mets treasure.
For the full story on Al Jackson, read his wonderful bio by Greg Prince of Faith and Fear in Flushing. Greg also put together the Mets fan eulogy to big-hearted little Al.