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How Daniel Jackson evolved into Chatham’s premier power threat
CHATHAM, Mass. — There are few creatures on the planet more physically imposing than the white rhinoceros. The odd-toed ungulate walks around on four legs, averaging out at roughly 5,100 pounds in adulthood and wielding a sharp, ivory horn directly above its nose.
It’s a walking oxymoron: a herbivore that harbors all the makings of an apex predator. It carries the size and strength to overpower almost any animal on terrain, wielding an intimidating horn that extends up to 150 centimeters. Its global population has shrunk to 17,000, a process accelerated by exploitative poachers who target rhinos for their ivory horns, making a king’s ransom by selling them through illegal, secondhand markets.
In Chatham, though, thousands of miles away from its native habitat, a white rhinoceros has taken up residence at Veterans Field. He subsists on a heavy diet of Sweet Tomatoes pizza. He has tree-trunk legs, using them to wreak havoc on basepaths. And despite standing at 6-foot-2, 203 pounds, he takes batting practice swings with all 5,100 pounds of a rhino’s force.
His name is Daniel Jackson. Right now, he’s the A’s premier offensive threat.
“Those are good,” Jackson said, referring to the Animal Planet documentaries he’d watch about rhinos. “It just feels like I'm watching myself on TV in the wild.”
Last summer, Jackson only got the chance to spend the final week of the season in Chatham, posting a .563 OPS in the four games he played. But after transferring from Wofford to Georgia last offseason, he bolstered his confidence with the Bulldogs, crushing 14 home runs and adopting his rhino persona thanks to his standout physical presence. After returning to Chatham for a second summer, he’s carried that offensive success into the Cape, leading the Anglers in home runs (four), OPS (.897) and a litany of other statistics.
“If I were him, I’d have all the confidence in the world going up against any pitcher,” former Georgia outfielder Nolan McCarthy said of Jackson. “If you're him, you know you can miss the baseball, and you can still have a good chance to have an extra-base hit.”
His power is the trait that landed him in the Cape Cod Baseball League All-Star Game a few weeks ago, where he demolished a two-run blast fresh off the bench. It’s the trait that earned him a spot in the CCBL Home Run Derby, where he crushed a 472-foot homer — the longest shot of the day — despite getting eliminated by Bourne’s Kuhio Aloy. And above all, it’s the trait that earned him his rhino moniker at Georgia this past year.
Would it surprise you to learn he didn’t hit a home run until his senior year of high school?
“You know, the Portuguese guys that have mustaches in ninth grade, they’re 5-foot-9 and they stay 5-foot-9,” Jackson’s father, Dan, said. “For sports, you wanna bloom late.”
Daniel Jackson adjusts his elbow pad in the dugout during Chatham's 6-6 tie against Cotuit on June 25, 2025. Currently, Jackson leads the A's with four home runs this season. Photograph by Ella Tovey
His freshman year at North Springs High School (Georgia) was a wash. A combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and a torn hip flexor he suffered that year prevented him from making any impact on the varsity squad.
To keep himself occupied during his isolation, Jackson played recreational basketball. Dan was far from enthused at the idea, regularly reprimanding his son with colorfully-worded cautions.
Those admonishments fell on deaf ears. Jackson continued to play basketball, broke his foot and missed over a third of his sophomore season. He had to wait until his junior year to play a full, uninterrupted season with North Springs.
Jackson was — and still is — a line-drive hitter. Once he recovered from his injuries, he continually roped extra-base hits for North Springs: doubles, triples, liners that skipped off the wall. But they always fell inches short of the fence.
“(Those hits) were fun to watch, anyway. I thought it was great,” Dan said. “But I think it started to eat at Daniel a little bit.”
Coming out of North Springs, Jackson was both overlooked and underrecruited. Dan said his son carried a few Division II offers at that point, schools that weren’t notable enough for him to recall. Heading into his senior year, it seemed like securing a D-I offer and hitting a home run were goals that were linked to one other, though both appeared increasingly unattainable.
That summer, Jackson played travel baseball with 6-4-3 Baseball, hoping to gain any sort of D-I exposure. Two weeks in, he stood in the box as a wayward fastball veered behind his head, smashing his thumb into pieces and forcing him out of commission for six weeks.
On the first day he was eligible to return to action, Jackson was re-inserted behind the dish. A Wofford contingent was in the stands that day, and they made him an offer almost immediately after the game. He didn’t have to take much time to mull it over.
“Wofford was a really good school, (it) gave me the opportunity,” Jackson said. “After my visit, I just knew it was the place where I needed to go.”
His commitment to the Terriers almost seemed to coincide with his emergence as a power threat, as if vanquishing one demon exorcised the other one which had eaten at him.
Jackson spent obsessive amounts of time lifting weights, giving him the power he needed to send his line drives over the fence. He hit four homers in his final season at North Springs, and two days after his high-school graduation, he shipped off to the Olean Oilers of the New York Collegiate League, where he added two more jacks in 18 games for extra measure.
“When he left two days after high school, that's when you really know what your kid wants to do,” Dan said. “Because they decide: Are they gonna go to the gym? Are they gonna hit every day? Are they gonna lift? Are they gonna catch bullpens?”
By the time he arrived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Jackson had developed a chip on his shoulder. In his eyes, it didn’t matter that he was just a freshman. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t even on a full scholarship — the $45,000 he was offered didn’t cover the entirety of the school’s $65,000 tuition. He was going to become the Terriers’ best hitter, forcing the college baseball world to start paying attention.
Daniel Jackson, clad in catcher's gear, participates in a team meeting following the A's 4-2 win over Cotuit on June 19. This summer, Jackson has split time at first base, right field and behind the plate for Chatham. Photograph by Ella Tovey
In his freshman year at Wofford, he blasted a then-career-high 12 homers, drove in 69 runs and slashed for a .357/.460/.599 statline. He claimed a spot on the Southern Conference All-Second Team, earned Freshman All-American honors, and was crowned the Southern Conference Freshman of the Year.
Largely due to his efforts, Wofford won the Southern Conference in 2024, earning a spot in the NCAA Tournament. Its season ended on June 2 — a 13-6 loss to LSU in the Chapel Hill Regional — and soon after, Jackson had his exit interview with the coaches.
Heading into 2025, Wofford had planned to raise its tuition to $70,000. Coming off a stellar freshman season, Jackson was rewarded for his efforts with an additional $5,000 tacked onto his scholarship. They still wouldn’t offer him the full cost of admission.
On June 6, 2024, Jackson announced his intent to transfer. Terriers’ head coach JJ Edwards called him soon after, offering to try and raise his scholarship, but it was far too late.
He entered the portal at noon. His phone rang within six minutes. Jackson spent the successive 10 hours fielding calls, while Dan and his stepmother, Brandi Adjmi, created a spreadsheet to log information about each program that called.
Soon enough, Georgia came calling, and on June 11 — the day after the Bulldogs were eliminated from the College World Series — Jackson went on an official visit.
“When we saw that he went in, he became a high priority for us,” Georgia head coach Wes Johnson said. “We thought he could be a very special player.”
Brock Bennett, Georgia’s recruiting coordinator, led the Jackson family on their visit, making sure to show them the Bulldogs’ new, state-of-the-art $45 million athletic facility. As they toured Georgia’s campus, Dan asked Bennett what he liked about his son, a question he asked on every visit he went on.
Bennett responded by telling him he had watched every pitch Jackson caught at Wofford, before launching into a lengthy diatribe about his framing, pulling up specific pitches he felt were erroneously scored at his detriment. Dan was flabbergasted.
“You looked at 5,228 pitches?” Dan asked.
“I love baseball,” Bennett replied.
Georgia’s coaches called him repeatedly in the following days, hoping to earn a commitment from him. Two days later, Jackson committed to the Bulldogs on the way back from his visit with Ole Miss.
“I knew that I wasn’t just gonna go there to go there,” Jackson said of UGA. “I felt wanted.”
Toward the end of the summer, Bennett, hoping to give his newest catcher more at-bats, placed Jackson in Chatham to replace Ike Irish, the future 2025 first-round pick who had just departed. He only got to spend four games on the Cape, crushing a homer but hitting for a .188 batting average.
Jackson enjoyed his stay in Chatham, but he never really felt truly comfortable, given just a week to adjust to a completely new environment. Anglers outfielder Ashton Larson, who was also in Chatham last summer, remembers him being much more reserved.
“I think he was surprised last summer that they wanted him,” Bennett said. “I think he didn't know how good he could be.”
In Athens, however, he wasted zero time getting himself acclimated.
On Jan. 19, 2025, roughly a month before the season began, Georgia outfielder Slate Alford published an Instagram post, a four-photo collage consisting of preseason Media Day photos. Jackson, supporting his teammate, decided to leave one of 48 comments on the post.
“Absolute rhinoceros,” his reply reads, a compliment to Alford’s strength.
Over time, that innocuous quip was flipped on him. As Jackson blasted a career-high 14 home runs — highlighted by a 10th-inning walk-off shot against Auburn on March 28 — his teammates dubbed him, “The Rhino.” He fully bought into it.
After every one of those blasts, Jackson would extend his thumb and pinkie as he rounded the bases, placing his thumb squarely in the middle of his forehead to pantomime a rhino horn. McCarthy gifted him a rhino onesie, starting a never-ending onslaught of rhino-related paraphernalia. And when he hung out with McCarthy, Jackson would often turn on Animal Planet documentaries to watch rhino fights, carefully observing himself in his natural habitat.
Through that first year, Jackson’s confidence grew tenfold. Johnson refined his plate approach, often citing former Bulldog Charlie Condon — the third overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft — as an example to show Jackson how he could harness his power by lowering his chase rate.
“The more you lay off that slider, and the count goes from 0-1 to 1-0, the more that pitcher now has to come into the strike zone to get you out,” Johnson said. “And Daniel's really good when the ball's in the strike zone.”
Daniel Jackson puts on his catching gear ahead of Chatham's annual Fenway Day workout on June 18. After his impressive performance at Fenway, scouts for the New York Yankees showed interest in Jackson. Photograph by Ella Tovey
Three weeks after he departed Chatham for the first time, newly-hired Anglers’ manager Dennis Cook reached out to Jackson, gauging his interest in a return. Cook was impressed with his brief 2024 stint in Chatham, and he thought a full season would only help him even more.
Now, equipped with an improved plate approach and a world of newfound confidence, Jackson has established himself as one of the Cape’s best hitters. His .897 OPS ranks third in the CCBL, while his .436 on-base percentage is currently tied for the league’s best total.
As he heads into a crucial draft-eligible junior season, he’s only helped his cause with Chatham. He even attracted the attention of New York Yankees’ scouts at the CCBL’s annual Fenway Day, who invited him to undergo a “sports science test,” according to Dan.
“He wants to hit, he wants to work and he wants to listen,” Cook said. “That’s the kind of kid we want (in Chatham).”
The Anglers, like all CCBL teams, have a regimented pregame batting practice schedule. The team is split into three groups of position players, and one group at a time hits batting practice before an alarm rings on assistant coach Brett Doe’s phone, indicating it’s time for the next group to rotate in for their turns. It’s a rarity to see any sort of mobility between groups.
Jackson changed that. On July 17, days before he was due to appear in the CCBL Home Run Derby, he thought his swing was off in his first round of BP. So, since the second group only had three hitters — Jackson Freeman, Jake Hanley and Roman Martin — he stuck around.
His second round ended on an otherworldly home run streak. It might have been around eight consecutive blasts, but it felt like a thousand. Every single pitch Anglers assistant Taylor Sanagorski fed him was being chewed up and spit out like a sunflower seed, sent over the wall with ease. He said this was how batting practice is supposed to feel. He was in the zone.
That day, Jackson scored Chatham’s only run in an 8-1 loss to Hyannis. It was a solo home run deposited into the hill behind the Veterans Field right-field fence, exactly like all of Sanagorski’s pregame offerings.
It’s a scary sight when a rhino enters its flow state. In Jackson’s second summer in Chatham, it seems the rest of the CCBL is just now figuring that out.
It’s a walking oxymoron: a herbivore that harbors all the makings of an apex predator. It carries the size and strength to overpower almost any animal on terrain, wielding an intimidating horn that extends up to 150 centimeters. Its global population has shrunk to 17,000, a process accelerated by exploitative poachers who target rhinos for their ivory horns, making a king’s ransom by selling them through illegal, secondhand markets.
In Chatham, though, thousands of miles away from its native habitat, a white rhinoceros has taken up residence at Veterans Field. He subsists on a heavy diet of Sweet Tomatoes pizza. He has tree-trunk legs, using them to wreak havoc on basepaths. And despite standing at 6-foot-2, 203 pounds, he takes batting practice swings with all 5,100 pounds of a rhino’s force.
His name is Daniel Jackson. Right now, he’s the A’s premier offensive threat.
“Those are good,” Jackson said, referring to the Animal Planet documentaries he’d watch about rhinos. “It just feels like I'm watching myself on TV in the wild.”
Last summer, Jackson only got the chance to spend the final week of the season in Chatham, posting a .563 OPS in the four games he played. But after transferring from Wofford to Georgia last offseason, he bolstered his confidence with the Bulldogs, crushing 14 home runs and adopting his rhino persona thanks to his standout physical presence. After returning to Chatham for a second summer, he’s carried that offensive success into the Cape, leading the Anglers in home runs (four), OPS (.897) and a litany of other statistics.
“If I were him, I’d have all the confidence in the world going up against any pitcher,” former Georgia outfielder Nolan McCarthy said of Jackson. “If you're him, you know you can miss the baseball, and you can still have a good chance to have an extra-base hit.”
His power is the trait that landed him in the Cape Cod Baseball League All-Star Game a few weeks ago, where he demolished a two-run blast fresh off the bench. It’s the trait that earned him a spot in the CCBL Home Run Derby, where he crushed a 472-foot homer — the longest shot of the day — despite getting eliminated by Bourne’s Kuhio Aloy. And above all, it’s the trait that earned him his rhino moniker at Georgia this past year.
Would it surprise you to learn he didn’t hit a home run until his senior year of high school?
“You know, the Portuguese guys that have mustaches in ninth grade, they’re 5-foot-9 and they stay 5-foot-9,” Jackson’s father, Dan, said. “For sports, you wanna bloom late.”
Daniel Jackson adjusts his elbow pad in the dugout during Chatham's 6-6 tie against Cotuit on June 25, 2025. Currently, Jackson leads the A's with four home runs this season. Photograph by Ella Tovey
His freshman year at North Springs High School (Georgia) was a wash. A combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and a torn hip flexor he suffered that year prevented him from making any impact on the varsity squad.
To keep himself occupied during his isolation, Jackson played recreational basketball. Dan was far from enthused at the idea, regularly reprimanding his son with colorfully-worded cautions.
Those admonishments fell on deaf ears. Jackson continued to play basketball, broke his foot and missed over a third of his sophomore season. He had to wait until his junior year to play a full, uninterrupted season with North Springs.
Jackson was — and still is — a line-drive hitter. Once he recovered from his injuries, he continually roped extra-base hits for North Springs: doubles, triples, liners that skipped off the wall. But they always fell inches short of the fence.
“(Those hits) were fun to watch, anyway. I thought it was great,” Dan said. “But I think it started to eat at Daniel a little bit.”
Coming out of North Springs, Jackson was both overlooked and underrecruited. Dan said his son carried a few Division II offers at that point, schools that weren’t notable enough for him to recall. Heading into his senior year, it seemed like securing a D-I offer and hitting a home run were goals that were linked to one other, though both appeared increasingly unattainable.
That summer, Jackson played travel baseball with 6-4-3 Baseball, hoping to gain any sort of D-I exposure. Two weeks in, he stood in the box as a wayward fastball veered behind his head, smashing his thumb into pieces and forcing him out of commission for six weeks.
On the first day he was eligible to return to action, Jackson was re-inserted behind the dish. A Wofford contingent was in the stands that day, and they made him an offer almost immediately after the game. He didn’t have to take much time to mull it over.
“Wofford was a really good school, (it) gave me the opportunity,” Jackson said. “After my visit, I just knew it was the place where I needed to go.”
His commitment to the Terriers almost seemed to coincide with his emergence as a power threat, as if vanquishing one demon exorcised the other one which had eaten at him.
Jackson spent obsessive amounts of time lifting weights, giving him the power he needed to send his line drives over the fence. He hit four homers in his final season at North Springs, and two days after his high-school graduation, he shipped off to the Olean Oilers of the New York Collegiate League, where he added two more jacks in 18 games for extra measure.
“When he left two days after high school, that's when you really know what your kid wants to do,” Dan said. “Because they decide: Are they gonna go to the gym? Are they gonna hit every day? Are they gonna lift? Are they gonna catch bullpens?”
By the time he arrived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Jackson had developed a chip on his shoulder. In his eyes, it didn’t matter that he was just a freshman. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t even on a full scholarship — the $45,000 he was offered didn’t cover the entirety of the school’s $65,000 tuition. He was going to become the Terriers’ best hitter, forcing the college baseball world to start paying attention.
Daniel Jackson, clad in catcher's gear, participates in a team meeting following the A's 4-2 win over Cotuit on June 19. This summer, Jackson has split time at first base, right field and behind the plate for Chatham. Photograph by Ella Tovey
In his freshman year at Wofford, he blasted a then-career-high 12 homers, drove in 69 runs and slashed for a .357/.460/.599 statline. He claimed a spot on the Southern Conference All-Second Team, earned Freshman All-American honors, and was crowned the Southern Conference Freshman of the Year.
Largely due to his efforts, Wofford won the Southern Conference in 2024, earning a spot in the NCAA Tournament. Its season ended on June 2 — a 13-6 loss to LSU in the Chapel Hill Regional — and soon after, Jackson had his exit interview with the coaches.
Heading into 2025, Wofford had planned to raise its tuition to $70,000. Coming off a stellar freshman season, Jackson was rewarded for his efforts with an additional $5,000 tacked onto his scholarship. They still wouldn’t offer him the full cost of admission.
On June 6, 2024, Jackson announced his intent to transfer. Terriers’ head coach JJ Edwards called him soon after, offering to try and raise his scholarship, but it was far too late.
He entered the portal at noon. His phone rang within six minutes. Jackson spent the successive 10 hours fielding calls, while Dan and his stepmother, Brandi Adjmi, created a spreadsheet to log information about each program that called.
Soon enough, Georgia came calling, and on June 11 — the day after the Bulldogs were eliminated from the College World Series — Jackson went on an official visit.
“When we saw that he went in, he became a high priority for us,” Georgia head coach Wes Johnson said. “We thought he could be a very special player.”
Brock Bennett, Georgia’s recruiting coordinator, led the Jackson family on their visit, making sure to show them the Bulldogs’ new, state-of-the-art $45 million athletic facility. As they toured Georgia’s campus, Dan asked Bennett what he liked about his son, a question he asked on every visit he went on.
Bennett responded by telling him he had watched every pitch Jackson caught at Wofford, before launching into a lengthy diatribe about his framing, pulling up specific pitches he felt were erroneously scored at his detriment. Dan was flabbergasted.
“You looked at 5,228 pitches?” Dan asked.
“I love baseball,” Bennett replied.
Georgia’s coaches called him repeatedly in the following days, hoping to earn a commitment from him. Two days later, Jackson committed to the Bulldogs on the way back from his visit with Ole Miss.
“I knew that I wasn’t just gonna go there to go there,” Jackson said of UGA. “I felt wanted.”
Toward the end of the summer, Bennett, hoping to give his newest catcher more at-bats, placed Jackson in Chatham to replace Ike Irish, the future 2025 first-round pick who had just departed. He only got to spend four games on the Cape, crushing a homer but hitting for a .188 batting average.
Jackson enjoyed his stay in Chatham, but he never really felt truly comfortable, given just a week to adjust to a completely new environment. Anglers outfielder Ashton Larson, who was also in Chatham last summer, remembers him being much more reserved.
“I think he was surprised last summer that they wanted him,” Bennett said. “I think he didn't know how good he could be.”
In Athens, however, he wasted zero time getting himself acclimated.
On Jan. 19, 2025, roughly a month before the season began, Georgia outfielder Slate Alford published an Instagram post, a four-photo collage consisting of preseason Media Day photos. Jackson, supporting his teammate, decided to leave one of 48 comments on the post.
“Absolute rhinoceros,” his reply reads, a compliment to Alford’s strength.
Over time, that innocuous quip was flipped on him. As Jackson blasted a career-high 14 home runs — highlighted by a 10th-inning walk-off shot against Auburn on March 28 — his teammates dubbed him, “The Rhino.” He fully bought into it.
After every one of those blasts, Jackson would extend his thumb and pinkie as he rounded the bases, placing his thumb squarely in the middle of his forehead to pantomime a rhino horn. McCarthy gifted him a rhino onesie, starting a never-ending onslaught of rhino-related paraphernalia. And when he hung out with McCarthy, Jackson would often turn on Animal Planet documentaries to watch rhino fights, carefully observing himself in his natural habitat.
Through that first year, Jackson’s confidence grew tenfold. Johnson refined his plate approach, often citing former Bulldog Charlie Condon — the third overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft — as an example to show Jackson how he could harness his power by lowering his chase rate.
“The more you lay off that slider, and the count goes from 0-1 to 1-0, the more that pitcher now has to come into the strike zone to get you out,” Johnson said. “And Daniel's really good when the ball's in the strike zone.”
Daniel Jackson puts on his catching gear ahead of Chatham's annual Fenway Day workout on June 18. After his impressive performance at Fenway, scouts for the New York Yankees showed interest in Jackson. Photograph by Ella Tovey
Now, equipped with an improved plate approach and a world of newfound confidence, Jackson has established himself as one of the Cape’s best hitters. His .897 OPS ranks third in the CCBL, while his .436 on-base percentage is currently tied for the league’s best total.
As he heads into a crucial draft-eligible junior season, he’s only helped his cause with Chatham. He even attracted the attention of New York Yankees’ scouts at the CCBL’s annual Fenway Day, who invited him to undergo a “sports science test,” according to Dan.
“He wants to hit, he wants to work and he wants to listen,” Cook said. “That’s the kind of kid we want (in Chatham).”
The Anglers, like all CCBL teams, have a regimented pregame batting practice schedule. The team is split into three groups of position players, and one group at a time hits batting practice before an alarm rings on assistant coach Brett Doe’s phone, indicating it’s time for the next group to rotate in for their turns. It’s a rarity to see any sort of mobility between groups.
Jackson changed that. On July 17, days before he was due to appear in the CCBL Home Run Derby, he thought his swing was off in his first round of BP. So, since the second group only had three hitters — Jackson Freeman, Jake Hanley and Roman Martin — he stuck around.
His second round ended on an otherworldly home run streak. It might have been around eight consecutive blasts, but it felt like a thousand. Every single pitch Anglers assistant Taylor Sanagorski fed him was being chewed up and spit out like a sunflower seed, sent over the wall with ease. He said this was how batting practice is supposed to feel. He was in the zone.
That day, Jackson scored Chatham’s only run in an 8-1 loss to Hyannis. It was a solo home run deposited into the hill behind the Veterans Field right-field fence, exactly like all of Sanagorski’s pregame offerings.
It’s a scary sight when a rhino enters its flow state. In Jackson’s second summer in Chatham, it seems the rest of the CCBL is just now figuring that out.
