Long before Jared Young became a major league baseball player the signs were there that the kid from Prince George was way ahead of his time.
You just had to watch him swing the bat to know he was something special.
He proved it time after time as a youngster before his dad’s men’s league games when he stood in the batter’s box and clobbered pitched balls deep into the outfield while his grandfather Lyle Young proudly took it all in.
In his first T-ball game at Peterson Park, barely five years old, Jared walked up the plate and from behind the backstop Lyle offered his grandson some incentive to make contact.
“Twenty-five cents if you hit the fence,” he said.
“Whack, it went all the way to the fence, and that caught on with the big kids (on older brother Tanner's team). They expected to get 25 cents if they hit it that far. I always carried two-bits with me.”
The following year Jared was playing a +game at Volunteer Park and the umpire, one of the fathers, decided to get behind the plate without wearing the pads. That didn’t seem like a problem when the first kid went to pitch and could barely get it as far as the plate. Jared was called in to replace him on the mound and Lyle said he’d pay him another quarter if he hit the catcher’s mitt with his pitch.
“The first pitch was a bloody bullet,” said Lyle. “The batter backed off, the catcher flinched and the umpire, he jumped five feet in the air and I thought ‘Holy crap, the kid did it again.’”
At six years old Jared was throwing darts and crushing the ball, traits he’s maintained throughout his career. His father and Little League coach Randy Young, a former North Idaho College/Whitman College catcher, also coached Jared’s six-years-older brother Tanner. Jared was the bat boy on those teams and spent his summers on the provincial tournament trail and on the practice field trying to keep up to the older kids. He idolized Tanner and his will to excel in sports, just like Tanner did, and that made Jared that much better than most kids his age.
“I always thought, this kid’s going to go a long way,” said Lyle.
A year after Jared was born, Lyle’s wife Loretta died at age 56 of progressive supranuclear palsy. Lyle got in the habit of following the team in his trailer for family baseball roadtrips together. Watching his grandsons play their games and learn life’s lessons on the ball diamond helped him get over his loss.
“It was really hard on my dad, he hung out with me and my kids and that helped him get through a lot, because he loves those boys,” said Randy. “It’s a pretty special bond they have, dad was always there to take the kids whenever they needed to go to - baseball, basketball, hockey - he was a very involved grandparent.”
Jared was also an exceptional hockey goaltender and by the time he was 14 he was good enough to make the short list for Team B.C. for the 2011 Canada Winter Games. He hurt his knee and ended up being the team’s last cut and that spurred his decision to focus strictly on baseball.
He was 16 when his parents, Randy and Dana, agreed he could make the move to Kelowna to play for the Okanagan Athletics Premier League team, billeting with the grandmother of teammate, Cole Laviolette. Jared was homesick and came back for his Grade 11 year to help Prince George Knights win the double-A provincial title at Citizen Field in 2012, but returned to the Athletics and graduated high school from Kelowna Secondary. He played one more year in the Premier League before he went off to college in Minot State University in North Dakota. He transferred the following year to NJCAA Division 1 Connors State College in Oklahoma and after his second year of college he was recruited by NCAA Division 1 Old Dominion in Virginia.
The Cubs drafted him in the 15th round in 2017. At almost every minor league stop he advanced the following year to the next level. Starting out in Eugene, Ore., he also made played in South Bend, Ind., Myrtle Beach, S.C., Kodak, Tenn., and Des Moines, Iowa before Chicago called him up for the first time in 2022.
Every summer, starting when Jared was in Little League, Lyle and his son Jim would load up the trailer and follow Jared around the province to his tournaments and once he made the minor leagues they’d book flights to watch him play. But in recent years, Lyle’s health issues have ruled out travel south of the border and he’s the only family member yet to see Jared play a triple-A or major league game.
For Lyle, there’s one road trip that stands out above all the rest.
In 2018, Jared was chosen as the Cubs’ Minor League Player of the Year and as one of the perks, he and his family were flown to Chicago as weekend guests of the team. Jared was introduced to the Wrigley Field crowd in a pre-game ceremony and they were treated to dinner in a five-star restaurant close to their swanky hotel.
“That field, I’ll tell you, it’s hallowed ground,” he said. “Jared is so quiet and he wanted the family members to behave themselves. I was kind of a wanderer around Wrigley Field, inspecting the dugouts and all that, and he was saying, ‘Grandpa, get back here.’”
Born during the Great Depression in 1934, Lyle grew up on a dairy farm with his parents and 12 siblings near Strasburg, Sask., 50 kilometres north of Regina, and he didn’t play baseball. His family didn’t have the time or the money for that, but they did what they could to improvise. His older brother found a hard rubber ball and they used a piece of pliable leather and sewed it up to make a ball and stuffed horsehair into another piece of cowhide to make a glove.
“We used the side of the barn as a backstop and he pitched to me overhand,” Lyle said. ”He threw that thing hard, I don’t know why I didn’t get killed.”
Lyle started out as a surveyor and he moved west in 1959 to take a job working for the highways department in Vancouver and that that led him to a job as a draftsman working for CN Rail. He moved up to Prince George in 1966 to take over as office manager and eventually became an engineer overseeing railway maintenance. He worked for CN until he retired at age 54.
That freed up more of his time to devote to his kids and grandkids as a minor football coach and referee and in baseball as a coach and umpire. Lyle was involved in high school volleyball as a tournament organizer and was a fixture keeping up the maintenance on the ball diamonds. He was known to feed the entire team at ballparks all over B.C. with food he brought out from his trailer.
On Sept. 16, 2022, Jared made his major league debut with the Cubs in Chicago against Colorado and in the eighth inning he doubled for his first career hit. He went on to play five more games, hitting .263 with five doubles. He’d finally made a dent as a big-leaguer.
In March he picked up where he left off, blasting a home run off White Sox pitcher Lance Lynn at Sloan Park in Phoenix at the World Baseball Classic to lead off the second inning - the only run for Canada in a 9-1 loss to the United States. That ball was retrieved from the stands and Jared later gave it to his dad to pass on to Lyle.
In June, Jared was blistering the ball again in triple-A when the Cubs called him up again and Tanner and his young family were in the stands at Wrigley for that first game when he cranked out his first MLB home run in his first at-bat against off Phillies ace Aaron Nola, then tripled in each of his next two games. Young’s bat cooled off by mid-July and he was returned to Iowa but he was back in the Chicago lineup for two games in September as an injury replacement. His first game back he hit a pinch-hit home run and two days later he tripled, and that marked his last hurrah with the Cubs.
Lyle turns 90 on April 23 and he’s looking forward to next season watching Jared try to earn an everyday position with the St. Louis Cardinals, who picked him up on waivers Nov. 6.
Lyle has an inoperable blockage in his carotid artery, which has led to a couple of strokes, and he has some issues with his balance and mobility that keep him grounded close to home but his mind is still sharp. He’s doesn’t think he’ll ever get to see Jared play a major league game live but he won’t miss streaming his games on the internet.
“I’m so proud of him. I watch every game. It’s euphoria,” he said. “He’s playing n the best baseball league in the world. Even the first time he went to single-A, it’s so beautiful to watch him play baseball with good ball players.
“He’s getting old like me, 28, and he’s going to have to continue to work hard to reach his goal. It’s once in a lifetime a guy can witness this, to have his own grandson playing in such a high-profile sport and he’s so close.”
