--- --- # Baseball Player Who's Secretly a Sorcerer Hits Ball Directly Back Into Pitching Machine by [Samantha Grossman](https://time.com/author/samantha-grossman/) ## Samantha Grossman Jun 20, 2014 3:38 PM UTC by [Samantha Grossman](https://time.com/author/samantha-grossman/) ## Samantha Grossman Jun 20, 2014 3:38 PM UTC \[mlbvideo id=”33863047″ width=”640″ height=”360″ /\] During batting practice Thursday, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Matt Joyce managed to launch a ball directly back into the pitching machine. It fired it back out quickly before he could realize what had happened. So sadly, no, he didn’t manage to hit it back into the machine, prompting some kind of perpetual back-and-forth pitching-and-hitting loop. But we still suspect that some kind of sorcery was happening here and someone should probably look into it. Tampa Bay Rays' Matt Joyce Hits Baseball Into Pitching Machine ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/2905005/baseball-player-whos-secretly-a-sorcerer-hits-ball-directly-back-into-pitching-machine/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/2905005/baseball-player-whos-secretly-a-sorcerer-hits-ball-directly-back-into-pitching-machine/"},"headline":"Baseball Player Who's Secretly a Sorcerer Hits Ball Directly Back Into Pitching Machine","datePublished":"2014-06-20T15:38:44.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T07:10:59.466Z","description":"We're onto you, Matt Joyce","url":"https://time.com/2905005/baseball-player-whos-secretly-a-sorcerer-hits-ball-directly-back-into-pitching-machine/","keywords":["Newsfeed","Sports topic","viral","Baseball","video"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Samantha Grossman","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/samantha-grossman/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-newsfeed/","name":"Newsfeed"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/2905005/baseball-player-whos-secretly-a-sorcerer-hits-ball-directly-back-into-pitching-machine/","name":"Baseball Player Who's Secretly a Sorcerer Hits Ball Directly Back Into Pitching Machine"}}]}] ```