This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo's Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
NEW YORK -- When Jared Young made the career-altering decision to sign with the Doosan Bears of the Korea Baseball Organization last summer, his agent offered up the cell phone number of another client playing in the KBO. If Young had any questions, his agent told him to ask Brandon Waddell.
By then, Waddell was already well into his third season in Korea. As an experienced Westerner and one of the only English speakers around, he gave Young tips on how to operate on the other side of the globe -- things like what to pack, where to eat and how to navigate one of the world’s largest cities. Waddell’s wife and Young’s girlfriend became close, going on shopping trips together and seeing tourist sites when their significant others were at work.
They all lived in the same apartment complex. Another Canadian on the team, Jordan Balazovic, completed the support system, along with three foreign players on the LG Twins team that shared a stadium with the Bears.
Among North American players who take jobs in Asia, Young and Waddell’s story is not particularly unique. What makes it extraordinary is not even that both went on to sign Minor League deals with the Mets this offseason.
It’s that both subsequently earned call-ups last Saturday -- on the same morning.
“Baseball has a weird way of making some good stories,” Young said, “and I feel like that’s a pretty good one.”
For Waddell, a left-handed pitcher, this was his second call of the season following a one-day cameo against the Twins in April. For Young, a utility man and designated hitter, it was his first time reaching the Majors since the Cubs designated him for assignment in 2023. For most of the first two months of the season, the pair had been playing together at Triple-A Syracuse.
There, they maintained a friendship born overseas.
“As you go over there, you don’t know anything, right?” Waddell said. “You’ve got to figure that out. I didn’t know him, had never met him before then. But obviously, that bond grows pretty quick.”
It helped that both players shared a common goal: to make it back to the big leagues. Waddell, who was 29 at the time, hadn’t pitched at the game’s highest level since 2021. Despite enjoying success in the KBO and the Chinese Professional Baseball League, Waddell didn’t know -- couldn’t know -- how his stuff would play in the Majors. It wasn’t until the Mets reached out early this offseason that he began to see a realistic path back to MLB.
Days earlier, the 29-year-old Young had inked a similar deal with the Mets, who valued his left-handed power and ability to play multiple positions. When Waddell signed on, Young reached out immediately, thrilled that he would know someone else in the organization.
Unlike in Korea, the two didn’t live in the same building at Syracuse, which led to some mild comedy last weekend. At around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Waddell received a call from a team staffer informing him of his call-up. The only problem was that no one could reach the slumbering Young, who was also supposed to travel to Queens. It took an emergency call from Waddell’s wife to Young’s girlfriend, and an eventual knock on his apartment door before word finally got to him.
When it did, the two headed to New York together to fulfill the same dream both had been pursuing last summer in Korea.
“The only way to describe it is crazy, right?” Waddell said. “To be able to come back and do the things that you were working toward, striving toward, is pretty cool. … It’s kind of hard to put into words.”