here

Posted on: August 20, 2025 at 11:05:38 CT

tl;dr = kid did something when he was 18, learned from it, turns out he's a good guy and they Jews all like him but the athletic still wants their inflammatory headline facts be damned




Yankees drafted player after he admitted he drew swastika on Jewish student’s door in college. Why?
Yankees drafted player after he admitted he drew swastika on Jewish student’s door in college. Why?
By Brendan Kuty and Keith Law
Aug. 20, 2025 5:00 am CDT
531

When the New York Yankees drafted University of Utah shortstop Core Jackson in the fifth round in July, they were aware that he had drawn a swastika on the dorm room door of a Jewish student in 2021, when he was a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Nebraska.

Jackson voluntarily called teams to tell them about his actions before the 2024 draft. In a phone interview with The Athletic, Jackson said that he was “blackout drunk” when he drew the swastika, and that he had no recollection of the incident or why he did it. He said he knows that he made a “really stupid mistake,” and that he has learned and grown since that time and is no longer “the person he was when it all happened.”

The University of Nebraska declined to discuss any specifics of the incident, and the university police did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Yankees amateur scouting director Damon Oppenheimer said the team’s decision followed the most thorough “due diligence” look into a player in his 23 years on the job, and that it was cleared directly with owner Hal Steinbrenner. The draft pick came after multiple members of the organization had conversations with Jackson and those close to him, and after discussing the situation with multiple high-ranking Jewish members of the club, including team president Randy Levine, who supported the decision to draft Jackson. The club, however, did not speak with anyone at Nebraska about the incident, according to Oppenheimer.

Jackson also was charged with driving under the influence on Utah’s campus in September 2024. According to his agent, Blake Corosky of True Gravity Baseball, the charge was later reduced to impaired driving, a misdemeanor. Corosky said Jackson had performed community service, received substance abuse training and paid fines. Jackson said he hasn’t “touched a drop of alcohol” in the months since.

Oppenheimer said he thought the swastika incident “affected (Jackson’s) draft status” and was likely part of teams’ calculus when he went undrafted in 2024. (Jackson transferred to a junior college for the 2023 season and played for Utah the past two seasons).

“I think that his tool set, his athleticism, his performance was definitely something that would have gone a lot higher in the draft,” the scouting director added.

The Yankees drafted Jackson at No. 164 overall this July, signing him to a bonus of $147,500, well under the pick’s $411,1000 slot value.

“I think it’s important that it is part of my story,” said Jackson, now 21. “I have this platform now that God has given me, and I can share my story about his forgiveness.”

The greater New York area was home to about 1.4 million people who identified as Jewish as of 2023, according to a study by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, making it the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel.

The Yankees were “looking to find the good in this,” Oppenheimer said.

“He’s shown his accountability here,” Oppenheimer said. “I think his actions have shown his remorse. He’s acknowledged it. I think he’s taken the right steps to continue to learn, to understand what he’s done.”

Jackson said he was so drunk the night he drew the swastika, in October 2021, that he blacked out and doesn’t remember any of the incident. He claims that he didn’t know who lived in the dorm room, and said that he “broke down in tears” the next day when someone told him what he had done.

“I felt like the worst person in the world,” he said. “I don’t want there to be any excuses for my actions.”

He said he wanted to apologize to the student, but that campus police told him to not contact them. He said the University of Nebraska fined him, had him undergo basic sensitivity training online and made him perform community service after the incident, but that there were “no other repercussions.” He was not arrested, and he played on the university’s baseball team the following spring.

A Nebraska spokesperson declined to comment on the situation, but said that it “takes discrimination and similar allegations very seriously and has policies and procedures in place to rapidly respond to student concerns.” The Athletic was not able to identify or speak with the victim, or to independently verify Jackson’s version of events. A Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the University of Nebraska asking for documents pertaining to the incident had not received a response at the time of publication.

Jackson played for the Nebraska baseball team in 2022, hitting .210 in 44 games, but left the school that summer. He described his freshman year as “being in a dark place,” and said that he departed because he was not “growing in my faith or getting better at baseball.”


Jackson makes a throw while playing for Nebraska in 2022. (John S. Peterson / AP Photo)
Jackson said he didn’t have any Division I offers upon leaving Nebraska, so he played his sophomore year at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, hitting .321 with four homers, 33 RBIs and a .907 OPS.

He was eligible for the draft in 2023 but wasn’t selected, and then enrolled at the University of Utah, where in 2024 he hit .363 with four home runs, 41 RBIs and a .979 OPS as a junior. That spring, he began attracting the attention of MLB teams intrigued by his arm strength, right-handed power and athleticism.

At the end of his first interview with a Boston Red Sox scout, Jackson was asked if there was anything else he wanted to talk about.

Jackson told him about the swastika incident.

“Everybody found out about it (then),” said Corosky, Jackson’s agent. “Including us.”

After hearing the story from Jackson, Corosky said he considered no longer advising the shortstop.

Corosky also represented Jacob Steinmetz, an Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect and the first practicing Orthodox Jewish player ever drafted. As a courtesy, Corosky said that he called Jacob’s father, Elliot, who is the head men’s basketball coach at Yeshiva University, a Division III Orthodox Jewish school in New York City. He wanted Elliot to be aware of what had happened.

Corosky told Elliot Steinmetz that Jackson appeared “extremely remorseful,” but also “doesn’t (understand) exactly what he did.” After Steinmetz’s initial anger faded, he suggested that Corosky consider trying to educate Jackson about antisemitism.

A few hours later, Steinmetz called Jackson.

“Right away,” he said, “you could tell (Jackson) was the nicest, sweetest kid in the world, (but) dumb as rocks when it came to these kinds of issues.”

According to Steinmetz, Jackson hadn’t seemed to fully grasp the dark history behind the swastika — the symbol that represented the German Nazi Party in the 20th century and is still being used by neo-Nazis worldwide. Jackson told Steinmetz that his education on the symbol was limited. Jackson grew up in a Christian household in Wyoming, Ontario, a rural town about 30 minutes from the Michigan border, and told The Athletic that he had hardly encountered Jewish people or learned about Jewish history in school.

Steinmetz had a point he wanted to impress upon Jackson.

“If I walked into a hall and saw a swastika, I’d be ****ed off,” Steinmetz said. “My grandparents would be freaked out and terrified by it.”

Corosky ultimately told Jackson he would continue advising him, but under two conditions.

First, Jackson would have to call a representative from each of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball and describe what he did. He told Jackson “not to pull any punches” no matter how difficult it was to talk about.

Second, Jackson would have to work with Steinmetz on “some intense, gut-wrenching understanding of why what he did was so hurtful and awful.”

Jackson agreed.

“Obviously,” he said of calling teams to inform them, “it wasn’t easy, but it was part of growing up and understanding to take ownership of my actions.”

Most scouts told Jackson they appreciated his candidness.

Steinmetz reached out to the head of Holocaust studies at Yeshiva, who put him in contact with Ann Squicciarini, then a graduate student at the school. Squicciarini, who is Christian, had enrolled in Yeshiva’s Holocaust education program in the wake of two Jewish students being attacked in her native Brooklyn in May 2021. Squicciarini designed a five-week course for Jackson, including video and reading assignments, and the pair met for an hour each week. Squicciarini logged everything, and sent post-session reports to Steinmetz.

“He was attentive and engaged,” Squicciarini said. Neither she nor Steinmetz were paid to work with Jackson; both said they wanted to use education to fight hate.

Ari Kohen, the director of the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at Nebraska, said that it’s “absolutely crucial” for society to learn how to teach antisemitism and preach awareness of “all forms of bigotry, truthfully, to young people today.”

“I don’t feel that we have fully figured it out at this point,” said Kohen, who was at the Harris Center when Jackson drew the swastika but had not been aware of the incident before being contacted by The Athletic. “Especially with how quickly our culture changes, thanks to social media, thanks to the meme-ification of all these things.”

It’s important to try to educate someone who commits an act of hate, Kohen said.

“If we drive to punish,” he said, “that doesn’t allow us to take that teachable opportunity. There’s a lot that I think we miss.”

Steinmetz agreed.

“It’s not redeemable if you think it’s just a joke,” he said. “It’s redeemable if you do the work, take the path back (and) prove to people you’re not just doing it to get a job out of it.”

Oppenheimer, the Yankees’ scouting director, has known Utah head coach Gary Henderson for more than 40 years. Henderson called him about Jackson in the fall of 2024 — well after the Yankees were aware of what Jackson had done. Other teams had been “very active in trying to understand the situation,” including the Houston Astros, Toronto Blue Jays and San Diego Padres, Corosky said. Jackson worked out for the Detroit Tigers and the Yankees.

Henderson told Oppenheimer that Jackson was “really playing well” and that “he’s turned a corner. He’s been a good person, a good teammate.”

That’s when the Yankees’ conversations began. Jackson met twice with Steve Nagy, the Yankees’ scout who covers Utah as part of the Four Corners region, who “heard the story for himself,” Oppenheimer said. Oppenheimer himself talked to Corosky, and then with Jackson and Steinmetz. Oppenheimer also met via video conference call with Jackson and Yankees director of mental conditioning Chris Passarella, who signed off on the decision.

Yankees national cross checker Mike Wagner, who is Jewish, met with Steinmetz. Oppenheimer met with assistant director of player development Stephen Swindal Jr., who is also Jewish, to discuss Jackson. Oppenheimer also called general manager Brian Cashman and Steinbrenner, who rarely gets involved in player selection, and arranged a conference call that Oppenheimer attended with Steinmetz and Levine.


Before drafting Jackson, Yankees officials ran the decision by owner Hal Steinbrenner (pictured in 2022), an unusual step before drafting a fifth-round pick. (Jessica Alcheh / USA Today)
The Yankees did not speak with anyone from the University of Nebraska, according to Oppenheimer, but they felt their process was thorough. “I don’t think we’ve ever done this,” Oppenheimer said regarding the breadth of their inquiry into a single draftee. “(Yankees brass) has knowledge of the players we think we’re going to be involved in, but not to the degree that they needed to be aware of (this) situation.”

“I feel that moving forward,” Oppenheimer said, “we’ve got a good citizen and a good person and a good baseball player.”

Minutes after the Yankees drafted Jackson on July 14, he called Steinmetz.

“He was thanking me for everything I did,” Steinmetz said, “how much it means to him, how he’s not going to let me down and how he’s going to get to work.”

Oppenheimer said he already made the player development staff aware of Jackson’s history, and that Jackson has had no issues since joining the Yankees, who quickly promoted him to High-A Hudson Valley.

Jackson said he understands that people may be upset by his past.

“I would ask for their forgiveness and let them know I’m not the same person I was when that happened,” he said. “I’ve grown up. I’ve learned. I’ve reconciled. I’ve done the things I needed to do to learn about it.”