Two 'identical' athletes had the same face, height, hair, and name — then they took a DNA test

Two people can either have the same hair or the same beard, and they may have the same name, or else the same height or the same facial features, but it's rare to find two people who have all these in common. A report in Good has revealed two people, who have the same face, the same red hair and beard, the same black glasses, the same height (6’4”), the same job, and even the same name - Brady Feigl.

It’s unbelievable how similar the two Bradys are. They’re both minor-league baseball players and they are both pitchers in their respective teams too. One of them played for the Texas Rangers Double-A club, while the other was a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. Looking at two individuals with so much similarity, the natural assumption is that they’re somehow related.

They probably thought about that themselves as they took a DNA test in 2019 to understand if they’re related at all. It wouldn’t be shocking if they were related but it turned out that they were not. They were just two unrelated people who looked the same, had the same name, the same height, and even the same job. However, they still see each other as brothers. "We're still brothers in a way I guess," one of them had said. "And we're always going to be Brady Feigl," said the other.

Another astonishing fact about them is that they both had Tommy John surgery done by the same doctor in 2015. It was during this time that they first became aware of each other's existence. “I was probably six or seven months out of surgery and their office called our trainer and said, ‘Hey, when’s Brady reporting for surgery? Is he getting down here tomorrow?’” one of them explained. “He was like, ‘He had it six months ago. What are you talking about?’ That’s how I found out there were two of us.”

Their identities clashed once again in 2017 when the University of Mississippi’s baseball team tagged the wrong person in a birthday post on X (formerly Twitter). The right person, who was signed to the team at the time, commented, “Wrong Brady Feigl.”

While it is incredible that two people with so much in common are not related to each other even in the slightest, folk wisdom suggests that somewhere out in the world, everyone has a doppelganger who looks exactly like them. Turns out that it might not just be the stuff of folk tales after all.

A study in the Cell Reports journal suggests that two people may look alike and have the same genetic characteristics even if they’re not related in the slightest. 16 similar-looking pairs were taken for the study and out of them, nine shared many common genetic variations known as single nucleotide polymorphisms. “These pairs are therefore like virtual twins,” said Manel Esteller, a geneticist who leads Spain’s Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, to Gizmodo’s Ed Cara.