Terry Francona did something on July 20 that would have sounded like a joke if you’d heard it a year earlier. The Reds were down three runs in the seventh inning, runners on second and third, one out. Instead of pitching to Dominic Canzone, Francona held up four fingers and put him on first — intentionally loading the bases for a guy who had hit 60 home runs the season before.

Even Canzone paused for a second before walking to first. Raleigh didn’t hesitate. First pitch, he launched a grand slam 408 feet into the second deck.

For a moment, it felt like vintage Big Dumper was still in there somewhere. T-Mobile Park finally got the kind of jolt it had been waiting on for months.

But that swing didn’t really change anything. If anything, it just made the rest of the season harder to explain. Because right now, Raleigh's hitting .161 with 12 home runs, 43 RBIs, and a .571 OPS through 85 games. No qualified hitter in baseball has been worse at the plate.

And that’s the strange part. Some regression was always coming. Nobody hits 60 home runs and just does it again like it’s normal — especially not a catcher who had never topped 34 before last year. A step back was expected.

What nobody expected was this.

The Follow-Up Was Never Going To Be Normal

Raleigh was already the best power-hitting catcher in baseball before things went completely off the rails last year. He hit 27 homers in 2022, 30 in 2023, and 34 in 2024. That 2024 season also came with 100 RBIs, a Gold Glove, and a Platinum Glove. Seattle lived with the strikeouts and the low average because the power, walks, and defense made him one of the most valuable catchers in the sport anyway.

The Mariners then gave him a six-year, $105 million extension right before the 2025 season. And honestly, for a while it looked like a steal. Then 2025 happened.

Raleigh hit .247/.359/.589 with 60 home runs and 125 RBIs. He broke the single-season record for a catcher, a switch-hitter, and a Mariner. He became just the seventh player in MLB history to reach 60 homers, won the Home Run Derby with his dad pitching to him, and still had enough left in the tank to add five more bombs when Seattle pushed the ALCS to Game 7.

He finished with 9.1 WAR, which is absurd for a catcher and one of the best marks ever at the position. He also finished second in AL MVP voting behind Aaron Judge, all while living behind the plate just about every night.

And it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors. The ball was absolutely flying off his bat. His average exit velocity jumped to 91.3 mph. Nearly half his balls in play were hard-hit, and almost 20% were barreled up. This wasn’t a guy sneaking to 60 on cheap homers or lucky bounces — the underlying numbers backed it up.

He even had that “first pitch, don’t blink” thing going — 17 homers on the first pitch of an at-bat, and a .427 average when he put the ball in play. He was getting out in front and pulling everything in the air.

But seasons like that don’t really stick around. A 19.5% barrel rate isn't something you just live at forever. Sixty-homer seasons aren’t normal, no matter how easy he made it look. If he had come back down to something like 35 homers and an .750 OPS this year, nobody would’ve blinked.

Twelve homers and a .571 OPS, though? That’s a different conversation entirely.

The Slump Started Before The Injury

The easiest way to explain all of this would be to say Raleigh hurt his side and everything went sideways from there. But the timeline just doesn’t really line up that neatly.

His offseason got cut short because he left Mariners camp to play for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic. It mattered to him — when he committed the previous All-Star break, he basically said it was a no-brainer. You don’t really turn that down.

The problem is, he barely got to play once he got there.

Raleigh went 0-for-9 with four walks and five strikeouts across three WBC games. Mark DeRosa eventually swapped him out for Will Smith in the semifinal and final. So instead of a normal spring where he’s getting consistent reps and building timing on both sides of the plate, he came back to Seattle without much of that rhythm work at all.

ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian later reported that a Mariners source felt the WBC really knocked him out of sync. Raleigh only got nine at-bats in two weeks, and there apparently wasn’t even a convenient setup for him to keep getting cage work in on off days. That’s not ideal for anyone, but it’s especially messy for a switch-hitter who basically has to maintain two different swings at once.

Raleigh himself hasn’t used it as an excuse. And to be fair, nine at-bats don’t “cause” a five-month slump on their own. But it does at least explain where the whole thing started to wobble.

Including the WBC, he opened the year 0-for-18 with 12 strikeouts. Then there was a brief stretch in late April where it looked like things were finally clicking — five home runs in seven games, all seven of his pre-injury homers coming in a 20-game window from April 6 to April 27. For a moment, it felt like he’d snapped out of it.

Then around May 1, his right side started bothering him.

He missed a few games, came back, and tried to play through it anyway. That’s when things really spiraled — 38 straight at-bats without a hit, 43 plate appearances between knocks, and he was suddenly flirting with one of the longest hitless stretches you’ll ever see. May ended with just two hits in 36 at-bats. On May 14, after he tweaked it again while moving to back up a throw, the Mariners finally shut him down with a right oblique strain.

It was the first IL stint of his big league career. He had played through pain before — even caught with a broken thumb in 2022 — but an oblique is different. It messes with the entire rotation of your swing.

And to be clear, the injury made a bad situation worse. It didn’t start it. Raleigh was already sitting at a 59 wRC+ through April 19, almost two weeks before the discomfort even showed up.

The month off was supposed to be a reset. He even homered twice in a rehab game, and for a second it looked like maybe that was it. But since coming back, it’s been more of the same: .606 OPS in June, .596 in July, and a .472 start to August.

His Swing Is Still Fast. It's Also Late.

The weirdest thing about Raleigh’s collapse is that, mechanically, it still kind of looks like Cal Raleigh.

The bat speed is basically unchanged — 75.2 mph down to 75.0. The swing is still the same long, looping 7.9 feet. The attack angle barely moved. Even the fly-ball rate, the popups, all of that stuff you’d expect to swing wildly when a guy falls off a cliff? It’s mostly the same.

Which is why this has been so confusing to watch. The “shape” of the 60-homer swing is still there. The results just aren’t.

Where it shows up is the part that actually matters. The ball isn’t coming off the bat the same way anymore. His hard-hit rate has dropped from 49.6% to 34.3%. His barrel rate is down from 19.5% to 13.1%. Exit velocity is down a couple ticks, and the absolute nukes — the 114 mph missiles — just aren’t showing up.

And that’s really the story. It’s not that he’s missing by a mile. It’s that a lot of his contact has gone from “oh no that’s gone” to “routine fly ball to right.”

You can’t really explain that away with luck. His actual production (.260 wOBA) is bad, and even the expected version (.295 xwOBA) isn’t close to what he was last year. That’s well below average.

The strikeouts make it feel worse, but they’re not the whole story. He’s up to a 32% strikeout rate, which is high but not unheard of for a power catcher. The problem is that when he does make contact, it just doesn’t do damage anymore. Guys can survive whiffing a lot if the ball leaves the yard when they connect. That part has gone missing.

The clearest clue is probably where he’s actually hitting the ball. Early in the slump, Statcast showed he was consistently getting to pitches a couple inches deeper than last year. Harold Reynolds called it what it is: he’s just late.

And that’s where things start to snowball. Because once you’re late, everything else gets harder. At one point he was hitting .069 against 95+ mph fastballs.

And honestly, there probably isn’t one clean explanation for it. The WBC messed with his spring. He came out of the gate behind. He tried to force it, had a brief power spike that made it look like he was snapping out of it, then the oblique injury hit and reset everything again.

By the time he came back, he wasn’t just trying to fix a slow start anymore — he was trying to dig out of months of bad at-bats sitting in his head.

Seattle Can't Wait For The Old Cal

Raleigh’s season would be shocking anywhere, but in Seattle it’s been especially brutal because it’s come with the Mariners treading water in a year they were supposed to take a step forward.

This was a team that came within one win of the World Series last October. They brought Josh Naylor back, kept most of their rotation intact, and went into the year expecting to be right back in the mix. Raleigh was supposed to be the middle of it all again.

Instead, Seattle is 56-63, 4½ games out of the AL West lead and four games out of a wild-card spot. They’ve scored 462 runs and given up 481. Baseball Reference has them at about a 13% chance to make the playoffs. A four-game losing streak has basically turned this upcoming stretch through New York and Houston into something that feels like playoff baseball.

And to be fair, this isn’t all on Raleigh. Julio Rodríguez has had his own slow stretches, Naylor hasn’t been consistent, and the rotation hasn’t been quite as automatic as everyone expected.

But Raleigh’s drop-off is the one that’s hardest to replace. This is a guy who was worth nine wins last year, caught just about every day, and gave a streaky offense a real “one swing changes everything” presence.

That’s also why the Mariners eventually had to move him down. Dan Wilson dropped him to eighth during the Rays series, then bumped him up to seventh. That’s a long way from hitting second most nights. But it’s also just reality — you can’t keep running a cold bat out in the middle of the order because of what he did last summer.

There are still real reasons to think Raleigh isn’t just gone as a hitter. The bat speed is still there, the barrel rate is still solid at 13.1%, and we’ve seen three straight seasons before this one where he was a legitimate 30-homer catcher. Nothing about this year erases who he is as a player or a leader.

The problem is, that might not matter enough in time for 2026.

That grand slam against Cincinnati was supposed to feel like the turning point. He came into that at-bat hitless in 15 straight, hadn’t homered since July 4, and had only gone deep twice since coming off the injured list. Then he crushed one after Francona’s intentional walk and for a night it felt like maybe things were flipping.

Since then, he’s got three hits in 24 August at-bats.

Last year showed how dangerous this team can be when everything lines up — timing, confidence, health, all of it clicking at once. This year has shown how quickly it can fall apart when even one of those things slips.

All stats courtesy of MLB.com.

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