How Giants are telling Rogers twins apart from each other
Tyler Rogers' wife, Jennifer, remembers meeting his parents for the first time. She was nervous. Not about impressing her then-boyfriend's family. She didn't know if she'd be able to tell him apart from his twin brother, who rode along in the truck to pick her up.
Seventy-five times over, every player with the Giants this spring training is experiencing the same feeling.
Before Taylor Rogers signed the three-year, $33 million contract that reunited him with his twin brother in the Giants' bullpen, he and Tyler sat around his Littleton, Colorado, house and discussed the potential downsides. This first week, with scores of interview requests and teammates struggling to tell them apart, was the first
thing that came up.
“First day was a little iffy. I think I walked up to them, like, that's Taylor over there, right? Now I think I've got it down,” said starter Alex Wood, whose locker is directly next to the brothers. “But damn if they don't look exactly alike, literally.”
It doesn't make it any
easier (or does it?) that the brothers' lockers are right next to each other. They play catch together every morning. They work out together. They go station-to-station in the same group of pitchers. They do, at least, live in separate houses here. (And Taylor wears No. 33, distinctively different than Tyler's No. 71.)
There are some tells, besides their number or their dominant hand, that teammates have picked up on.
No. 1, Taylor has the enviable hairline; Tyler's is slightly more faded.
Look closer, though, and you'll see their cowlicks also go in opposite directions. Like their throwing arms, it's a feature of being mirror-image twins, a phenomenon that occurs in about 25% of identical twins.
Jennifer took precautions before that first meeting.
Before the brothers arrived to pick her up, she sent a Snapchat to Tyler, “so I could see what he was wearing and I would know when they walked in, like, `Oh that one's mine!'
“But it's funny,” she said. “Right when they walked in the door I didn't even need to do that. I could just tell the difference between the two of them.”