CLEVELAND — Even when Jeremiah Jackson finally got his first walk this season, he was in a hurry.

On Sunday, Jackson was making his 69th plate appearance of the season — every other Oriole with at least eight plate appearances had at least one walk. Facing a 3-0 count, Jackson had a strike called but immediately challenged. By the time the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System showed the pitch was, in fact, a ball, he was almost all the way to first base.

Jackson isn’t here to take his time.

Ever since arriving for his big league debut in August, he has been on the attack. He got his first hit in his first game. He wound up with a .775 OPS and became one of the bright spots of the lost 2025 season.

And, if anyone thought Jackson’s performance last season was fluky, he’s followed with a sophomore effort that is blowing that out of the water.

The last nine games have been particularly seismic. Jackson has crammed in five homers over the last week and a half, establishing his power in addition to his contact hitting. He rarely walks because he is one to pounce, averaging just 3.14 pitches per plate appearance (one of the lowest figures in the MLB).

His bWAR (1) is tied for first on the team with Taylor Ward. But, unlike almost any other standout on Baltimore so far, Jackson cannot be sure what his future holds beyond the next few weeks.

The Orioles are hoping Jackson Holliday, last season’s everyday second baseman, will come back soon after a longer-than-expected recovery from hamate bone surgery. Jordan Westburg’s elbow has a more elusive timeline, but the club would welcome him back, too.

So where would that leave Jackson, the early-season hero trying to keep Baltimore (10-12) treading water with injuries galore? He’s not sure. The front office and coaching communication with his spot on the roster has been primarily concentrated on the present.

“I think we’re all just kind of taking it day by day,” Jackson told me this weekend in Cleveland. “Obviously, we got guys coming back, but at the end of the day, it’s my time to take advantage of the opportunity that I have. Whenever that time comes, when everybody’s back, that’s kind of, it’s kind of out of my hands.”

Allow me to say what Jackson cannot: He has earned the right to keep fighting for his spot in the lineup, even when the Orioles’ incumbents return.

That is not to besmirch Holliday, the former No. 1 pick who is just 22 and showed a lot of promise last season, or Westburg, who was an All-Star when healthy. Baltimore is better with both of them in the mix.

But Jackson’s battling spirit embodies a quality that has helped the Orioles scrap in key comebacks — and he shouldn’t necessarily have to cede his spot in the lineup to anyone the way he’s been playing lately.

It has never been more apparent than in the last week, as the Orioles as a whole struggled with strikeouts and stringing together hits. In their only two wins over the last seven games, Jackson hit home runs that dramatically changed the contests.

On Saturday after Jackson’s go-ahead homer, manager Craig Albernaz said Jackson had bounced back from iffy at-bats to start the game, making an adjustment that helped him crank one over the wall when Baltimore needed it.

“Just like him and the rest of our team, he still had a chance, and he wanted to get up there and compete,” Albernaz said. “He got a good pitch to hit, and he did what J.J. does and put a good swing on it.”

The imperative to attack a 1-0 count like Jackson does may come from his years in the minors. A 2018 second-round draft pick of the Angels, Jackson started his career with tons of fanfare but hit a ceiling in Double-A. After getting traded to the Mets, he still found himself topping out — after the 2024 season, he decided to go into minor league free agency.

The Orioles were very interested in him, a welcome change of temperature for the once vaunted prospect. After starting the season in Bowie in 2025, he finished in Baltimore — with no guarantee he’d be back but climbing all the same.

Even last year, Gunnar Henderson said, he thought Jackson showed the confidence of a more settled big league player.

“You can tell when somebody’s comfortable — they don’t even have to be getting hits or anything, but just how they take their at-bat,” Henderson said. “They take the close pitches and get the swings off, and then they hit it hard even if it’s right to somebody. I felt like last year, when he got up, they were giving him a chance and he took it and ran with it.”

It will be nearly impossible to sustain the heat of Jackson’s early start, but he has shown enough to earn more runway, no matter what the rest of the roster looks like. His production has made it feel evident the Orioles shouldn’t option him whenever they need to recall Holliday and Westburg.

But those two may need to battle their way back to everyday bats in the same way Jackson has seized his opportunity. He brings a valuable contribution to the team’s alchemy that goes beyond his slash line.

To Henderson, Jackson’s story is one of perseverance. From their common Alabama roots, Henderson had the meteoric rise to the majors and the 2023 AL Rookie of the Year. Jackson had to grind for years in the minors until he had agency to choose his baseball pathway.

Now they’re batting in the same lineup.

“That’s why baseball is one of the greatest games … seeing kind of different career timelines,” Henderson told me. “With J.J., it obviously took him a couple years, but now he’s just been able to lock in on whatever routine he needed to do to get himself ready. … It just comes with time, and, yeah, a lot of people don’t wanna wait on it, but it’s just the reality of the sport.”

Now Jackson is attacking every moment with the urgency of a man who can’t guess how many more moments he’ll have. The least the Orioles can do in return is give him a bit more certainty that he’ll be here for a while to come.