From the start, Edwin Jackson has known that a baseball career does not always go smoothly. It was the first lesson he absorbed as a professional, roughly half a lifetime ago.
“Whatever happens, keep a straight face,” Jackson said, recalling the words of an early pitching coach, Marty Reed. “Because that’s going to be the first thing everybody’s looking at: How do you handle failure?”
By every measure, Jackson’s career has been anything but a failure. He is pitching in his 16th major league season, a journey that began on his 20th birthday with a victory over Randy Johnson in 2003. He has won a World Series, made an All-Star team, thrown a no-hitter and earned $77 million. At 34, he has never so much as iced his arm, let alone needed surgery. Now he is holding down a rotation spot with the Oakland Athletics, the hottest team in the majors.
But Jackson’s most remarkable achievement is a testament to dealing with rejection: He has played in the majors for 13 organizations, tying former reliever Octavio Dotel for the most in major league history.
“He’s amazing,” said Khris Davis, Oakland’s designated hitter. “I talk to him every day about the game. He’s a competitor at heart, and that’s what makes you stronger, being able to bounce back.”
Jackson has bounced, indeed, and not just in baseball. His father, Edwin Sr., was a sergeant first class in the Army, and Edwin was born in Germany. As a boy, he lived at Fort Polk, in Louisiana, and also in Montgomery, Alabama, Germany again, and Columbus, Georgia. His wife, Erika, is an Air Force veteran.
“We joke about that,” Jackson said. “Will we ever live somewhere for more than five years, even after baseball is done?”
They spend the offseason in Arizona, where Jackson, a right-hander, has several unopened equipment bags with souvenirs to one day fill his den. He has kept a jersey from each of his teams — and, yes, he can recite them in order: Los Angeles Dodgers, Tampa Bay Rays, Detroit Tigers, Arizona Diamondbacks, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals, Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Braves, Miami Marlins, San Diego Padres, Baltimore Orioles, Nationals (again), A’s.
Dan Evans, the former Dodgers general manager, assigned Jackson No. 36 as his first uniform number in honor of Don Newcombe, the Dodgers’ first star African-American pitcher. Jackson has the number tattooed on his left forearm, as a pair of dice showing a 3 and a 6. He just keeps rolling along, wherever the game takes him.
“I’ve played in every division now,” Jackson said in the Oakland dugout before a game in Houston on Tuesday. “Now that I’ve played for an AL West team, I’ve knocked them all out.”
Reminders of his past surround him. A teammate, outfielder Matt Joyce, was traded for Jackson in 2008, when Jackson went from Tampa Bay to Detroit. An Oakland coach, Mike Aldrete, threw to Jackson in the batting cage during the furious final innings of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series for the Cardinals, who ran out of position players and thought they might need Jackson to pinch-hit.
A.J. Hinch, the manager of the Astros, was Jackson’s manager with the Diamondbacks in 2010. That June, Hinch left Jackson in for 149 pitches — still the most by any pitcher since 2005 — to pursue his no-hitter at Tampa Bay. Jackson walked eight, threw a wild pitch and hit a batter, but finished the job.
“We skipped him the next time through and gave him extended rest, but I remember thinking to myself, ‘How long does he have to pitch until I’m no longer responsible for an injury?’” Hinch said, laughing. “And then when he signed his big deal with the Cubs, I felt like justice had been served and I was off the hook.”
Most of Jackson’s career earnings have come from that Cubs deal: four years, $52 million starting in the 2013 season. He went 16-34 and was released in mid-2015, but made no excuses and walked away proud.
“The people in the clubhouse, they know the work ethic, they know who you are as a person, they know you’re getting blasted but you’re still taking the ball every fifth day, ready to go,” Jackson said. “I could get buried by the fans, but the media could never bury me, because I was accountable.”
Jackson called the 2011 championship with the Cardinals his highlight — he was teammates with Dotel then — and he pitched a pivotal but overlooked elimination game along the way. In Game 4 of the division series, with the Cardinals needing to beat Philadelphia to stay alive, Jackson started by allowing a double, a triple, a single and two runs.
“But I still felt the most calm I’ve ever felt in a game,” he said. “Totally peaceful. Zero stress at all, like, ‘I’m going to make it out of here.’”
He did, blanking the Phillies through the sixth to earn the victory. It was a sweet bit of revenge for an inglorious moment with the Rays during the 2008 World Series in Philadelphia, where Jackson allowed a home run to pitcher Joe Blanton.
“It was a fastball, just trying to groove it in there,” Jackson said. “It ran back across, middle in, right into his bat path.”
A few years ago, Jackson started fiddling with a fastball that cuts in the other direction, away from a right-handed hitter. He finally perfected it, and now has a new weapon to go with a fastball that can still touch 97 mph.
“The great thing about pitchers is they can always tinker, always sort of add or subtract from their repertoire,” Oakland general manager David Forst said. “He’s done a great job of adapting over the years.”
Jackson was 1-0 with a 2.45 ERA in three starts with Oakland through Thursday. Those games followed 13 starts in Class AAA — 10 for Washington’s affiliate in Syracuse, and three for Oakland’s in Nashville. He has also toiled in Norfolk, Virginia; Jupiter, Florida; and El Paso the last few seasons, content to be a strong arm — and a strong will — for hire.
“I want to leave the game on my own terms,” Jackson said. “That’s why I continue to do what I do, just because I’m not ready to leave. I still have some life in me. I still have fun, and I know I can still get outs.”