BALTIMORE -- Wednesday’s Blue Jays-Orioles doubleheader at Camden Yards came with a little piece of MLB history tucked into the umpiring crew.
Austin and Tyler Jones became the first identical twins to work the same MLB game on the same umpiring crew. In Game 1, Baltimore’s 4-2 win, Austin handled first base and Tyler worked second. For Game 2, the Orioles again won 4-2, and the brothers swapped spots, with Tyler at first and Austin at second.
For the Jones twins, it was a long time coming.
“This is something we’ve dreamed about forever,” Tyler said.
The brothers, who grew up near Charleston, S.C., got started in umpiring at 15 after the father of one of their friends was looking for Little League umpires. Since they were both baseball players and fans, they jumped in together.
They went to umpire school together at 18 and were in the pros by 2014. That year, they even worked a game together on the same crew in the Gulf Coast League.
After that, though, the overlap mostly disappeared. The twins were assigned to different lower-level Minor League leagues and never worked together on the same crew in Double-A or Triple-A. The only other times they shared a field after that one-off GCL game were in the Arizona Fall League in 2024, including the annual Fall Stars Game.
Even now, both are still mostly working in Triple-A, with occasional MLB fill-ins. Austin has been getting those big league call-ups since 2024, while Tyler has been doing the same since ‘25.
The chance to finally do it together in Baltimore almost came out of nowhere. On Tuesday afternoon, Tyler was napping at his hotel when Austin called from home, where he was using some scheduled time off before heading to Washington for this weekend’s Mets-Nationals series.
Tyler told him he’d been asleep.
“Why? You don’t have a game tonight,” Austin replied.
“I didn’t realize we had already been rained out,” said Tyler, who had worked Monday night’s Blue Jays-Orioles opener before Tuesday’s postponement.
Then came the surprise: Austin was driving from Charleston to Baltimore after his supervisor gave him the assignment to join the doubleheader crew.
“We were told last year, ‘OK, if we can make it happen, we’ll make it happen.’ And it didn’t, the schedules didn’t align,” Tyler said.
“Even this year, we weren’t sure if it was going to happen or not. And then, it was kind of a shock, so it’s like a scramble to get everybody that we can here.”
The family was there for the moment, too. Their parents, their wives and Austin’s three children were all in the stands, and they stayed through all 18 innings of the split doubleheader, with a hotel break in between games.
For Tyler, the best part was getting to share the whole day with his brother inside the ballpark, from the locker room to cards before the game and the usual pregame and postgame crew time.
“We talk to each other daily, especially about baseball and about everything and what we go through on a day-to-day basis,” Tyler said. “But to be able to live it together and come to the ballpark and see him in the locker room and play cards with him before the game and share that experience was probably the best part.
Because that’s where we like to interact with each other, the other crew members before the game, after the game and stuff. So that was really cool.”
By the nightcap, the moment had settled in a little more. Austin said his wife gave him a reminder to pause and take it all in.
“It was cool to look over, and that’s something my wife told me. She was like, ‘Hey, when you’re out there, obviously you’re looking at your partners every pitch every play, but take a second and look at him not as just the guy working first base, your partner, look at him as your brother,’” Austin said. “So I did that a little bit more so tonight.”
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