You鈥檒l never see this again: 12U Maple Valley player hits two baseballs in same swing
Jun 9, 2025, 5:15 PM | Updated: Jun 10, 2025, 7:22 am
You could watch baseball for 100 years and never see this play happen again.
Two balls. One swing. 12-year-old just made the rarest play in baseball
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The rare play happened on Sunday afternoon at South Hill’s Heritage Recreation Center during a 12U tournament.
On one field, Jazz Espinosa from the Elevate Hooks 12U Richardson team out of Sumner fouled off a pitch. The ball launched high and started drifting out of play.
The ball kept climbing higher, then it cleared the fence and floated toward the next field. Parents began to yell the familiar warning, 鈥淗eads! Heads up!鈥�
Next door, in the middle of live play, Lucien Vachon from Rock Creek 12U Red out of Maple Valley was swinging at a pitch of his own.
Jazz Espinosa (left) from the Elevate Hooks, and Lucien Vachon (right) from Rock Creek. (Photo: Charlie Harger, Seattle’s Morning News)
As he brought the bat through the zone, the foul ball dropped right into his swing path. Somehow, incredibly, he made contact with both baseballs. One ball went fair, and the other went foul.
For a moment, nobody said anything. The fields went quiet as everyone tried to make sense of what they had just seen.
Then one parent broke the silence with a simple reaction, 鈥淲hat the…?鈥�
There is no line in the rulebook for this. No coaching drill. No good explanation.
Just two baseballs, one swing, and a one-in-a-billion result.
The play did not stop the game for long, but it became the talk of the tournament. Other players came over between innings to ask if it really happened.
Someone caught it on video, and that clip is now bouncing around group chats and will be for years.
Jazz Espinosa hit a foul ball in another game. Lucien Vachon connected with two balls at the same time.
It made no sense, but everyone there will remember it for the rest of their lives.
The odds of this happening are astronomically small
Using AI, Lucien’s father, Alex, calculated the odds of a baseball event like this happening.
- 聽 聽Foul ball flying into another field at the right location: 1 in 5,000
- 聽 聽Timing overlap (within one second): 1 in 180
- 聽 聽Two balls meeting at the sweet spot of the bat: 1 in 1,000,000
- 聽 聽Both pitchers throwing strikes: 36%
- 聽 聽Both batters deciding to swing: 49%
- 聽 聽And the final piece鈥攖hat it was Lucien, specifically, up to bat and swinging: 1 in 405
Total estimated odds: 1 in 1.13 trillion.
Despite the once-in-a-lifetime moment on the diamond, the umpire merely ruled the play a single.
Listen to聽鈥淪eattle鈥檚 Morning News鈥�聽with Charlie Harger and Manda Factor weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on 成人X站 Newsradio. Subscribe to the podcast聽here.
