The Twins made it official: Alex Jackson is off the 40-man roster, outrighted after clearing waivers following his designation for assignment. It's a minor transaction on paper, but it's the byproduct of a genuinely weird sequence of roster math that started with a special event in Iowa.
Here's how it happened. MLB let both the Twins and Phillies carry a 27th man for one day for the Field of Dreams Game. Minnesota used that extra spot to activate Byron Buxton off the injured list. The catch: once the special-event roster expanded, the Twins had to shrink right back down to a standard 26-man roster the next day. Because Jackson is out of minor-league options, he couldn't just get optioned to Triple-A St. Paul quietly. He had to come off the 40-man entirely first.
Jackson's role had already been fading. He was Minnesota's third catcher behind Ryan Jeffers and Victor Caratini, called up in mid-May when Jeffers fractured his hamate bone. Once Jeffers returned around the All-Star break, Jackson became the odd man out — he hadn't started a game since July 30 and had just one plate appearance all of August before the DFA came down.
The bigger picture is a career that never quite matched the pedigree. Jackson was the No. 6 overall pick back in 2014 and has bounced through six different organizations since. His career line sits at a rough.174/.252/.305 with a strikeout rate creeping toward 40%. This season in Minnesota was actually a bright spot on the surface — a.303 average in 29 games — but the underlying numbers (an expected average closer to.191) suggest it was more small-sample luck than a breakout.
Financially, this isn't a big loss for either side. Jackson was making $1.35 million with roughly $300K left on the deal, and accepting the outright assignment to St. Paul lets him keep that money rather than forfeit it for free agency. He's now organizational catching depth rather than a big-league roster piece, and the Twins get their 40-man spot back to use on someone with more of a path to the majors down the stretch.