Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #22: From Polo Grounds to Port St. Lucie: Al Jackson, Met for Life

Welcome to the twenty-second installment of Mets Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, where we dig through the dustier corners of Mets history like we’re searching for that 1964 Topps coin of Choo Choo Coleman that slipped between the couch cushions during a rain delay. This is where we honor the guys who didn’t get bobbleheads, banner days, or SNY retrospectives—but who left their mark with a gutsy outing, a moment of perseverance, or the simple dignity of showing up for a struggling team that desperately needed innings, leadership, or a heartbeat.

Last time, we spotlighted T.J. Rivera, the Bronx-born contact machine whose brief, shining stint in Queens felt like a rally in human form—a reminder that not all heroes arrive with five tools or prospect hype.

This week, we rewind the tape all the way back to the early '60s, to those lovable expansion-year Mets whose record-setting futility was matched only by their endearing cast of characters. Standing tall among them—not in stature but in stature of spirit—was a soft-spoken southpaw who bore the brunt of the growing pains, gamely taking the mound while chaos swirled around him.

Let’s talk about Al Jackson—the original Met who lost 20 games not once, but twice… and still somehow earned nothing but respect from teammates, opponents, and future generations. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t famous. But in the darkest early days of Flushing baseball, he was our ace.

Al Jackson’s name doesn’t always roll off the tongue when Mets fans rattle off the legends of Flushing. But if you peel back the onion on the origins of the franchise—on the struggle, the soul, and the slim margins between defeat and dignity—you’ll find Jackson’s fingerprints on every formative chapter of the early Amazins.

A compact left-hander from Waco, Texas, Jackson was among the first to don a Mets uniform, having been plucked from the Pirates in the 1961 expansion draft. He started the third game in Mets history—losing, predictably, as the team dropped its first nine in 1962—but immediately distinguished himself as a cut above the chaos. That season, the Mets finished an infamous 40-120, and Jackson led the team with eight wins. That number may sound modest, until one realizes it was 20% of the team’s total. He also threw all four of the club’s shutouts that year, each in the first game of a doubleheader, as if to symbolically say, “Let’s at least start the day right.”

Jackson’s quiet excellence during the Mets’ most tumultuous year earned him a spot on the 1962 Topps All-Rookie team, and within the clubhouse, his peers saw more than just a good arm. Clem Labine called him the Original Met with the best stuff. Galen Cisco said he knew exactly what he was doing on the mound. Gary Kroll went a step further: “Put him on a club that could hit, he’d win 20 games every year.”

Instead, he became the Sisyphus of Shea.

By 1969, when the Mets stunned the world by winning it all, Jackson was still around—barely. He made 10 appearances that year with a bloated 10.64 ERA. His last outing, on May 22 in Atlanta, saw him surrender five runs in two-thirds of an inning during a 14-0 blowout. The Mets were 1-8 in games he appeared in. It was an ending more befitting the 1962 club than the '69 Miracle Mets, and by mid-June, with Nolan Ryan returning and roster spots tight, Jackson was sold to the Cincinnati Reds. Just like that, the final active link to the Original Mets was gone.

The irony? For all the contributions he made during the lean years, Al Jackson did not receive a World Series ring. Instead, his portion of the 1969 windfall was a mere $203.97—a third-place share from the Reds. The Mets' full winner’s share that year was $18,338.18.

Still, Jackson’s legacy wasn’t confined to stat sheets or shares. In George Vecsey’s Joy in Mudville, there's a haunting scene after the Mets clinched the 1969 National League East title. Hot Rod Kanehl, another Original Met, wandered the jubilant clubhouse with a mixture of pride and alienation. When Kanehl introduced himself to Tommie Agee, the Mets’ center fielder responded afterward by asking, “Who is that?” The disconnect between the Original Mets and their miracle successors was stark. Yet if one player could have bridged that generational gap with a little more luck or better timing, it was Al Jackson.

His career, in many ways, was a study in just-missed moments. He wasn’t on the Pirates’ roster in 1960 when they won the World Series. He played for the 1967 champion Cardinals during the regular season but didn’t make the postseason roster. And in 1970, a week after joining the Reds, he was released as Cincinnati began a pennant-winning campaign.

But Jackson was not a ghost of losing past—he was its anchor. He showed early Mets fans that someone could actually pitch well in a Mets uniform, even if the scoreboard rarely told the truth. His one-hitter against Houston in 1962 was the franchise’s first near no-hitter. In 1965, he came within five outs of the Mets’ first-ever no-no before Willie Stargell broke it up.

And then there’s June 17, 1962—Father’s Day at the Polo Grounds. Jackson started that infamous game, giving up a two-run homer to Lou Brock in the top of the first. But it wasn’t his arm that earned the headlines. Marv Throneberry, the tragically comic first baseman, hit what should have been a triple—only to be called out for missing both first and second base. “Can’t anybody here play this game?” manager Casey Stengel famously moaned. That, too, was an Al Jackson game. Present for the slapstick, just not part of the punchline.

In that sense, Al Jackson was more than an Original Met. He was the Original Met—the player who best embodied the team’s early paradox: often outmatched, frequently forgotten, but never without fight. Though his 1969 statistics may relegate him to the margins of Miracle Mets lore, history remembers him not for his ERA, but for enduring through an era.

Following his playing days, Al Jackson found his true calling in shaping the next generations of pitchers. While he had stints as pitching coach for the Red Sox from 1977 to 1979 and the Orioles from 1989 through 1991, it was his long-standing role within the Mets organization that defined his post-playing legacy. He was a constant voice of experience in the organization for decades, mentoring pitchers at nearly every level until a stroke in 2015 finally forced him to step back. Though he briefly managed Kingsport of the Rookie League in 1981, Jackson quickly realized his greatest value to the organization came from his hands-on work with pitchers, not from sitting in the manager’s office.

Based in Port St. Lucie, Florida—where the Mets now hold Spring Training—Jackson became a fixture on the back fields, working tirelessly with hurlers from young prospects to seasoned veterans. His impact wasn’t always loud or flashy, but it was deeply felt. Ron Darling remembered Jackson’s tough-love approach when they crossed paths at Triple-A Tidewater in 1982. Darling, then 22 and more focused on beach life than big league dreams, credited Jackson with snapping him into focus. “He’d say, ‘What do you have to be content about? You haven’t done anything. You haven’t struggled,’” Darling wrote in The Complete Game. Jackson’s philosophy was simple: don’t ease into anything—attack from pitch one.

That same edge served him well later on as the Mets' bullpen coach during their 1999 Wild Card and 2000 National League Championship seasons under Bobby Valentine. Al Leiter, the ace of those squads, was among those who tipped his cap to Jackson for elevating his game. And way back in the late ‘60s, it was Jackson who offered wisdom to Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, helping them make the leap from promising to dominant.

“No one,” the Mets’ 2018 media guide proclaimed, “exemplifies the Mets organization more than Al Jackson.” That sentiment rang especially true during key organizational celebrations. He was not only part of Shea Stadium’s farewell in 2008, but uniquely included in the 40th-anniversary festivities for the 1969 Mets championship team at Citi Field in 2009—even though he wasn’t on that postseason roster. In ’08, he wore his original No. 15 jersey; by ’09, he was back in No. 38, the number he wore before being released that magical summer.

When word spread in 2015 that Jackson had suffered a stroke at age 79, the tributes poured in. Marty Noble, who covered the Mets for decades, called him “as good a man as you could hope to meet in a half-century around the game,” noting that while Jackson’s on-field numbers may have seemed modest, his character, kindness, and steadiness placed him among the finest human beings in the sport.

Jackson’s devotion to the game and the Mets ran deep—something reflected in the next generation. One of the two sons he raised with his wife Nadine, Reggie Jackson (no relation to the Hall of Famer), pitched in the Mets' minor league system from 1982 to 1984, a testament to a family fully immersed in the sport.

Even in his later years, Jackson wasn’t done giving back. In 2007, he traveled as part of an MLB outreach program to West Africa, teaching the fundamentals of pitching and sharing the beauty of the game with kids across the globe—no doubt slipping in a story or two about his former teammate Marvelous Marv and that unforgettable day on the basepaths.

Al Jackson died in 2019, but for those who watched the Mets before they were miraculous, his name still echoes off the Polo Grounds walls, through Shea’s fading concrete, and into the soil beneath Citi Field. He was the beating heart of a team that taught baseball how to lose with grace—and, eventually, how to win with joy.