Danny Jackson spent three decades not knowing he owned a piece of baseball history.
That changed in 2015, when Jackson was in the stands in Kansas City with his family watching the Royals chase another World Series title. A scoreboard trivia question flashed up his name and the forgotten detail attached to it: he had thrown the only immaculate inning in postseason history.
“It took me 30 years to know that I even did it,” Jackson, the two-time All-Star and 1988 NL Cy Young runner-up, told MLB.com in a phone interview this week. “I had no idea.
My whole family was there with me -- my kids, grandkids, all that -- and they saw my name and they looked at me and said, ‘Dad, did you have that?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea if I did or not.’”
The inning itself came in Game 5 of the 1985 World Series, when Jackson struck out the side on nine pitches in the seventh. At the time, nobody on the broadcast treated it like history. Al Michaels didn’t mention it, because the phrase “immaculate inning” still hadn’t made its way into baseball vocabulary.
Jackson was in the middle of a much bigger fight, anyway. The Royals were trying to claw back from a 3-1 deficit, and they needed every inch they could get. Jackson had already helped them survive the ALCS with a shutout in Game 5 against Toronto, and Kansas City was back in another pressure-packed spot with the season on the line.
“Danny was a bulldog,” Royals catcher Jim Sundberg said. “He just stepped up big time.”
Jackson delivered exactly that. The Royals were ahead 4-1 when he retired Terry Pendleton, Tom Nieto and Brian Harper in order, and Kansas City went on to win 6-1, a victory that fueled the comeback.
The start of the sequence nearly went sideways immediately. Pendleton sent the first pitch into foul territory near the third-base dugout, and George Brett made a desperate feet-first slide into the dugout in an attempt to catch it. He came up a little banged up and missed the play by inches.
“Truthfully, thanks to George for not catching that foul ball in the dugout,” Jackson laughed. “I guess that was fortunate.”
From there, Jackson finished Pendleton with a slider on the outside corner and another slider down and in for strike three. He was never the type to pile up huge strikeout totals -- he had only one punchout through the first six innings -- but his fastball sat in the low 90s and moved both ways, and his slider gave hitters another problem.
“Of all the pitchers I caught, outside of the knuckleball, he was the hardest guy for me to catch because of the movement on his pitches,” Sundberg said. “And I caught nine Hall of Famers.”
Nieto was next and tried to bunt his way aboard, but the attempt went foul. He followed with another foul pop before taking a called third strike on the outside corner. Nieto briefly argued with home-plate umpire John Shulock, and, as the story now goes, there was no ABS Challenge System back then to add another twist.
Harper, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, came up last. He chopped two fouls before swinging through a slider for strike three.
“I was taught early on by Willie Stargell when I was with the Pirates that when you pinch-hit, you come off the bench swinging,” Harper said. “I remember that night [Jackson] was throwing inside a lot. When a left-hander is throwing hard and can command that side of the plate as he did, it’s tough to hit.”
Nine pitches. Nine strikes. One historic inning, and no one knew it until years later.
“I didn't know anything about the immaculate inning either,” said Harper, who said he learned about it only this week when reached by phone.
Jackson has embraced the odd little place he holds in postseason lore, but he says the larger memories matter more to him: helping the Royals win that seven-game World Series, plus being part of the 1990 World Series-champion Reds and the 1993 National League-champion Phillies.
“I really never even thought about the immaculate inning, but I’m also kind of surprised that it took this long for anyone to even ask about it,” he said.
After hearing the news for the first time, Harper was asked whether he had any reaction to being part of the only immaculate inning in postseason history.
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