I was surprised this week to see that pitcher Jay Jackson, the track of whose pro career looks like a Lonely Planet travelogue, has announced his retirement from baseball.
Jackson left a huge impression everywhere he went, suffered some heart-breaking trauma and led me down an important path of discovery into the nature of Japanese baseball.
After ostensibly retiring at least once before, Jackson, who was drafted out of Furman University by the Cubs in 2008 and also played in the minors for the Marlins, Pirates and Brewers before reaching America’s majors with the Padres in 2015 and Japan’s with the Carp the following year.
Jackson found himself a home in Hiroshima, where he made an impact on not only his teammates, like Allen Kuri, who credited Jackson with helping him find a more natural delivery, but also on local citizens, with whom he worked to create a clothing brand.
After Jackson’s Japanese partner gave birth to a son, things started to get weird. He was released in 2018 after his third season despite striking out more than one batter an inning in each of his three seasons. Granted, it wasn’t a great season for Jackson, but less reliable pitchers were getting employed by other teams when despite his good reputation with other players, couldn’t even get a tryout.
Instead, Jackson pitched for Milwaukee in 2019, and just as things appeared to be looking up, his former partner began refusing to let him visit their son in Japan. By signing with the Lotte Marines for 2020, Jackson believed it would make it easier to get visitation rights. Unfortunately, his second stint in Japan proved to be a rabbit hole of the Lewis Carrol variety, leading to a bizarre series of events that led to his essentially being deported.
The following stories document the official process by which Jackson ended up in jail in Hiroshima after pitching a game for the Lotte Marines in Chiba in July 2020.
Jackson home after charges dropped
The circumstances were extremely suspicious and may have been linked to the family of his former partner wanting to put an end, once and for all, to Jackson’s appeals to see his infant son.
But Jackson proved to be a cat, one with nine baseball lives that always lands on its feet. In 2021, he was pitching for the San Francisco Giants, in 2023 the Braves, and 2024 the Blue Jays.
Jackson has since had another child that survived a long hospitalization after birth.
I am grateful for his willingness to share his experiences with me and others.
One day when he was with the Carp playing an interleague game in Chiba, Jackson told me something that set me down the path of resolving a mystery that in turn taught me a lot about Japan.
Japan’s left-handed mystery
Whenever I talk to an import pitcher in Japan, I almost always ask what adjustments they have made against Japan’s left-handed hitters. It’s something I never would have known to ask if it hadn’t been for Jackson telling me about how his pitch selection had changed since coming to Japan.
He said his biggest adjustment was to not throw his two-seamer to most left-handed hitters, because they weren’t trying to drive the ball but rather flick it to the left side either in the air over third or on the ground between third and short. As a result, his two-seamer was running onto the barrel of their bats like he was putting it on a tee for them.
That little bit of information didn’t register significantly at the time, but Jackson explained it so well that it remained with me I accidentally discovered how the overall offensive performances of Japanese left-handed and right-handed hitters varies dramatically: “Does NPB type cast.”
That revelation led me to question why it was that way here, but not in America. Further conversations with Dr. Kozo Furushima and youth baseball coaches led me to understand why it is that Japanese left-handed-hitters are, as a group, shorter, lighter and faster than their right-handed-hitting countrymen and far more likely to be middle infielders: “Japan’s left-side story.”
