Cal Raleigh’s season has turned into one of baseball’s strangest plot twists.
A year after launching 60 home runs and putting together one of the most remarkable offensive seasons the sport has seen, the Mariners catcher has spent this year looking almost unrecognizable at the plate. And even by the standards of a rough season, the numbers are jarring.
Raleigh entered last night with a .163/.266/.307 slash line and a .573 OPS. Among players with as much playing time as he has, only Rockies shortstop Ezequiel Tovar had an OPS below .580. Raleigh also had just 17 extra-base hits in 69 games this season - 10 homers and seven doubles - after hitting 26 homers in the same number of games to open last season.
The power outage has been especially glaring because Raleigh’s game has always been built around impact contact. He’s never been a high-average, high-on-base hitter, but when he connects, the ball usually jumps.
That hasn’t been happening nearly enough this year. Last season, 49.6% of his batted balls were hard-hit, a mark that ranked in the top 15% of the league.
This season, that number has fallen to 32.1%, which sits in the bottom 15%.
That drop helps explain why the Mariners have had to live with such a massive hole in the middle of the lineup. Seattle still managed to stay afloat, improving to 51-50 after last night’s 8-0 win over the Reds and moving a half-game ahead of the Rangers for first place in the AL West.
The game itself offered the latest reminder that even a broken-down version of Raleigh can still scare a manager. In the seventh inning, Cincinnati intentionally walked the hitter in front of him to load the bases. Raleigh made the Reds pay with a grand slam, finishing off a six-run inning.
“I know what Raleigh’s hitting, and he still worries me,” Cincinnati manager Terry Francona said after the game. “But I thought it was our best chance to have them not score.
We could play the infield at double-play depth. And the worst possible outcome happened.”
It was a brutal outcome for Cincinnati, but it didn’t change the larger picture around Raleigh’s season. He began the night with only five extra-base hits over his previous 38 games, with two homers and three doubles since April 28.
That’s the kind of stretch that would have sounded impossible a year ago, when he hit 60 home runs - just the 10th time a player has reached that number in MLB history. He’s also only the fourth 60-homer player not widely linked to performance-enhancing drug use, and the only other switch hitter to get to at least 50 in a season is Mickey Mantle.
For the Mariners, the hope is simpler now: just get something closer to average from Raleigh down the stretch. If he can become even a merely mediocre hitter in the second half, it would go a long way toward giving Seattle some breathing room in the division.
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