Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer run gave baseball a memory worth keeping, and it’s exactly why the push to trim the regular season to 154 games feels so off.
Major League Baseball’s latest proposal to the MLB Players Association has plenty in it to chew over, but the one that stands out for Mariners fans is the idea of cutting the schedule back from 162 games. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires on Dec. 1, and while a lockout is widely expected from the owners, the two sides are still talking. Even so, this particular change lands like a punch to the gut if you’re the kind of fan who watched Raleigh make history last season.
The reason is simple: under a 154-game schedule, Raleigh’s 2025 blast count would have stopped short of the magic number. The Mariners’ season would have ended on Sept. 18, with Raleigh sitting on 56 home runs, which would have tied Ken Griffey Jr.’s franchise record.
Instead, he didn’t get to 60 until Game 158, at home against the Rockies. That’s the kind of late-season surge that turns a great year into a forever year.
Raleigh’s finish matters because he became just the seventh player in Major League history to hit 60 home runs in a season. It was the best story in baseball, and a shorter schedule would have taken that away.
Aaron Judge would still have reached 60 in 2022 even if the Yankees had only played 154 games, but he would have finished at 62 instead of 62? No - the source makes clear he would have landed at 60, not 62, and that would have left him tied-eighth all-time instead of standing alone in seventh.
MLB’s proposal doesn’t stop there. According to Mark Feinsand of MLB.com, another part of it would let the highest seeds in both the Wild Card and Division Series rounds choose their opponents.
That idea doesn’t sit right either, and it has the feel of something better described as “Mickey Mouse.” A cleaner answer, at least in this view, would be re-seeding after the Wild Card round so the top team in each league gets the lowest remaining seed.
There is one piece of the proposal that makes more sense: expanding the Division Series from best-of-five to best-of-seven.
But as always, that kind of give-and-take comes with the bigger labor fight hanging over everything. MLB keeps trying to package quality-of-life upgrades alongside less money, and the salary cap talk makes the whole thing even harder to buy into.
For Mariners fans, though, this is about more than bargaining points. The number 162 has been part of the game for as long as Seattle has been in the majors, and Raleigh’s season gave that full schedule a lasting piece of history. He put together what was arguably the best season ever by a catcher, and the payoff came in a moment Mariners fans won’t forget.
If another fan base gets to feel that same jolt someday, that’s the argument for keeping every chance on the table.
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