Seattle supersonic: Cal Raleigh is blasting his way toward a historic offensive season

New York Times

3 days ago

When the owners of the Seattle Mariners gathered last week for a meeting, Jerry Dipoto, the president of baseball operations, shared some data on their recent investment.
At the end of spring training, the Mariners committed $105 million to catcher Cal Raleigh, keeping him under team control through 2030. Raleigh is enjoying a breakout season, and Dipoto wanted to convey just how rare it is for a catcher to produce like this.
Advertisement
Raleigh leads the majors with 23 home runs, to go with career highs in batting average (.364), on-base percentage (.379) and slugging percentage (.637). He's a switch-hitter coming off a Platinum Glove season, guiding a strong pitching staff for the first-place team in the American League West. He has played in every game this season.
Add it all up, and Fangraphs gives Raleigh 3.8 wins above replacement, with 104 games to go — an extraordinary 10.6-WAR pace. Dipoto, who probably has the deepest knowledge of baseball history of anyone working in the sport, dove into his laptop to see how many catchers have done that.
The answer: Nobody. Even if Raleigh falls off the pace and finishes with 8 fWAR, he would still be in hallowed territory. Dipoto shared this chart with his bosses, listing the very few 8 fWAR seasons by catchers in MLB history:
That's eight seasons from seven players — five Hall of Famers; McCann, who made seven All-Star teams; and Posey, who is not yet eligible for Cooperstown and has the single-season fWAR record as the National League's MVP in 2012.
'And Cal, right now, is on pace to do better than that,' Dipoto said by phone on Monday. 'And if you look at what he's starting to accumulate, he's pushing 20 (career) wins above replacement. He's playing his 28-year-old season, and he's gotten better with each passing year. I really could go on about it for a long time, but he deserves to be recognized with the best players in the game.'
The reigning Most Valuable Players, Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers, have been predictably dominant this season. But what Raleigh is doing, especially at his position, has been similarly astounding.
Raleigh was the first catcher in MLB history to reach 20 home runs before the end of May. Then he started June by homering again in Sunday's 2-1 victory over the Minnesota Twins.
Before Raleigh, no catcher had pulled off all three of these performances in a single season: a two-homer game from the left side, a two-homer game from the right side and another game with a homer from both sides.
'I remember playing with Todd Hundley in New York the year that he hit the record number of homers for a catcher; he tied Roy Campanella with 41,' said Dipoto, a former Mets reliever, referring to a record now held by Salvador Perez. 'It was amazing, and when it was happening, we always referenced that Todd was an iron man because he caught all the time.
Advertisement
'Mitch Garver has taken a number of reps as our backup catcher — it's not like he's invisible on the team — but Cal has played in every game, which is just a stunning thing, even for two months, for a modern-day major-league catcher. And he wants to. He's always wanted to. He thrives on being involved in it. Cal's desire to play, to contribute — he sees the game from every imaginable level.'
Raleigh, a third-round draft pick from Florida State in 2018, has started 45 games behind the plate and 12 as the designated hitter. The one game he did not start, against the Athletics on May 6, he drove in the tying and go-ahead runs with a pinch hit in the ninth.
It wasn't Raleigh's most famous ninth-inning, pinch-hit, game-winner against the A's. That was his walk-off homer on Sept. 30, 2022, which snapped Seattle's 21-year playoff drought. The Mariners went on to win their first-round playoff series in Toronto before losing their division series to the eventual champion Houston Astros.
In 2023, when the better-funded Texas Rangers edged the Mariners for a playoff spot, Raleigh publicly questioned ownership's commitment, giving voice to widespread fan frustration. While Seattle has not splurged in free agency since then, Raleigh's six-year contract cemented his role as a franchise pillar.
'In our clubhouse over the years, Cal has been kind of a torch bearer for establishing a standard and demanding accountability,' Dipoto said. 'He's not a really loud guy at all. He is actually quite the opposite. He's kind of quiet, he observes and he's thoughtful. But when something needs to be said, he says it. He says it in the house, he says it outside the house, and he has really developed a good sense for how to be there as a leader for his teammates.'
The Mariners have had transcendent players over the years — Edgar Martínez, Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Félix Hernández — and Raleigh, who should make his first All-Star appearance next month, is not yet in their class. But in franchise history, only Griffey has hit more homers in the first five seasons of his career than Raleigh, and only Alex Rodriguez got to 100 homers faster than Raleigh, who did it in his 482nd game.
With 15 more home runs this season — a conservative estimate, given his start — Raleigh would become the 10th catcher to hit 130 through his age-28 season. The list demonstrates the company he's keeping:
*minimum 75 percent of overall games as catcher
Source: Stathead
So that's five Hall of Famers, three World Series-winning stalwarts (Parrish, McCann, Perez)… and Gary Sanchez. Raleigh has a long way to go, but his approach this season is encouraging for his future.
After coming into the season as a .197 career right-handed hitter, Raleigh is batting .296 from that side this year. He has been more disciplined at the plate, swinging at a career-low 27.9 percent on pitches outside the strike zone. (The league average is 31.2 percent.)
Advertisement
The Mariners are built around their pitcher-friendly home park; entering play on Monday, Seattle ranked third in the majors in OPS on the road and 24th in OPS at home. Overall, though, the offense has normalized, ranking 11th in runs per game (4.53) after finishing 21st last season, at 4.17.
All of it, Dipoto said, has played a part in Raleigh's rise.
'He's swinging at better pitches more frequently, and he's passing the baton in a lineup that I think he knows is a little deeper than it has been in the past,' Dipoto said. 'It's amazing what can happen when you don't feel like you need to hit a homer for us to score and the guys behind you can pick it up — and all of a sudden, he actually is hitting more homers.'
More, in fact, than anybody else in a year that could rank among the best at baseball's most punishing position.
(Top photo of Cal Raleigh:)