HARTFORD — When Jackson Marshall fills out the batter’s box, an experienced baseball watcher puts the hot dog in their lap and takes notice. Fielders are on high alert.
Less experienced, the youngsters stand on their seat and chant “Jack-son, Jack-son.”
A player this size gets your attention on a ballfield. Marshall didn’t hurt his standing with young fans when he tossed balls to them throughout UConn’s 9-5 victory over Rhode Island on a chilly Tuesday night at Dunkin Park. “He’s a guy that all the little kids seem to gravitate to,” UConn coach Jim Penders said. “He’s a fun one to be around.”
This was the backdrop as Marshall, 6-foot-8, 275-pound sophomore, took his stance and commenced to crushing baseballs. Three hard singles, the hardest a liner to right field clocked at 101 MPH off the bat by senior student manager Sara Clokey, who works with analytics for the baseball team. In Marshall’s last at-bat, with an inside-out swing, he launched a towering double off the right-field screen.
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“It’s insane power, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” teammate Cam Righi says.
To be sure, the righthanded-hitting Marshall, who transferred from Division II Southern New Hampshire, has been head and shoulders above most on the field for the Huskies (22-20), who have been having an uncharacteristically difficult season. After going 4-for-4 with a walk and three RBI in UConn’s 9-5 victory over Rhode Island, extending a hitting steak to 16 games, Marshall is hitting .387 through 41 games, with 10 homers, more than a quarter of the team’s total, 15 doubles and 38 RBI, a .472 on-base percentage and .655 slugging.
“I mean, it feels great,” Marshall said, after signing autographs for the little ones clustered near the dugout. “I put in a lot of work during the winter and the fall, changed a couple of things with my hands. I’m holding them up high now, getting balls I can drive, it’s awesome for the team, helping the team win. By the time I get to batting practice, I feel great, couple of good swings, I try to move the (bat speed) up and up and see what I can get to.”
Marshall was New Hamphire’s high school player of the year — in basketball, a 2,000-point scorer — and an all-stater in both sports. Yet UConn coaches were not sure he was “athletic enough” out of high school. “We missed on that one,” Penders said.
After he was the conference rookie of the year at SNHU, Marshall played last summer at Worcester in the Futures League, where he was a teammate of Pender’s son, Hank, a senior at Eastern Connecticut, who offered a positive scouting report.
Once in the transfer portal, got a call from UConn, took a visit, and now he’s the huskiest of Huskies outside the football team.
“What people don’t give Jackson enough credit for, he’s a really good hitter, not just a power hitter,” Penders said. “He took his singles, went to the opposite field, stayed in the at-bat, two-out RBI. He was out MVP tonight (against URI).”
Though he made an error Tuesday, he’s made only four all season, and he stole a couple of outs for UConn with his stretching ability.
Marshall has accomplished all this with a congenital condition, which was discovered when he was 12 or 13.
“I’m missing two bones in each foot,” he said. “They cave in, so I have custom orthotics. I go to doctors in Boston and they work me, they’ve been great, got me out here to play. I used to not be able to walk very well, it used to hurt to walk. At least that’s not happening.”
He walks and runs on the inside edge of his feet, so he wears out cleats quickly.
“People look at his feet and think, ‘he’s not very athletic,'” Penders said. “But he is very balanced. He’s overcome that. He wears out shoes like crazy, our equipment room can’t keep them in stock.”
Mostly, though, Marshall has been wearing out Division I pitching in his first go-around. He hit his first homer at Arizona State on Feb. 17, and went 8-for-18 with a homer during a four-game series at Arizona, and has been on a heater since. The Huskies (7-5) are hanging on to the fourth playoff spot for the Big East Tournament, which they will have to win to get back to the NCAA Field of 64, and Marshall is hitting .400 in conference play, going into a key survival series at Georgetown this weekend.
The Huskies have been dealing with some injuries along the way, losing some power in the lineup; they have 39 homers as a team. They generated runs with their legs against Rhode Island, stealing five bases and taking extra bases, a clue as to how they will have to play around their sluggers, Righi, the 2025 Gatorade Player of the Year from Wethersfield, who is hitting .341 with eight homers, and Marshall.
Not surprisingly, Marshall’s favorite player is Aaron Judge, who long ago exploded an old scouts’ theory that players this size are at a disadvantage in baseball. In fact, players come in all shapes and sizes, and find ways to overcome and thrive. That’s an older, more apt baseball truism.