At this point, there’s really just one more meaningful plateau Cal Raleigh can reach:
Sixty home runs.
He’s hit every other round number and set records for catchers and switch-hitters and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr., insane company for a 6-2, 235-pound backstop nicknamed Big Dumper to keep.
As Raleigh lumbers into the last 10 games of this season – all while aiming to keep the Seattle Mariners afloat atop the American League West – here’s a look at four startling facts about his historic 56-home run season:
He’s a catcher out-homering Kyle Schwarber, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge
Johnny Bench was the last catcher to lead the major leagues in home runs, hitting 45 in 1970. That was three years before the designated hitter was introduced to the American League in 1973.
Bench’s closest competition that year was slugger Frank Howard, who hit 44 home runs at age 33 and never hit more than 26 in any season thereafter. And like Billy Williams, Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski, Tony Perez and everyone else chasing Bench, Howard had to play the field.
That’s not the case for Kyle Schwarber (54 home runs) or Shohei Ohtani (50), save for the weekly pitching forays for the latter. And even the great Aaron Judge (48) has served 54 games as DH thanks to an arm injury (and to be fair, Judge has played in just 141 games due to that ailment).
In other words, hitting is the only thing those guys do most of the time. Raleigh, meanwhile, has to squat 130 or so times a night as the catcher and, in an era when preparation is paramount, devote more of his pregame mental bandwidth to attacking other hitters rather than perfecting an offensive gameplan for himself.
Schwarber is a three-time All-Star and Judge and Ohtani will be a Hall of Famer. That Raleigh is out-homering them all with one hand essentially tied behind his back defies belief.
He homers with nearly the same frequency right-handed as left-handed
There’s no such thing as a perfect switch-hitter. Simply, it’s impossible to feel exactly as comfortable from one side of the plate as the other, and even the greatest will sacrifice something – usually, power or perhaps batting average – in order to jump in the other batter’s box and enjoy a handedness advantage against any pitcher.
Yet consider this: Raleigh has hit 35 home runs in 464 left-handed plate appearances – a home run in 7.5% of his plate appearances.
And as a right-hander facing lefties, he’s hit 21 homers in 193 plate appearances – a home run in 10.8% of his plate appearances.
As if Raleigh wasn’t scary enough to face already, it’s even more daunting for opposing managers to think that there’s really no platoon advantage to gain turning him from one side of the plate to the other.
Heck, not even Mantle can make that claim. In 1961, when he hit 54 home runs to set the switch-hitting record Raleigh just broke, Mantle, over 443 plate appearances, hit 43 of his homers left-handed – 9.7% of his plate appearances. That’s almost twice the frequency as Mantle’s 203 plate appearances batting right-handed, when he hit just 11 home runs – 5.4% of his plate appearances.
Nothing against The Mick: It’s awfully hard to maintain your power stroke when you bat right-handed with far less frequency. It’s just another head-scratching feat from the Big Dumper.
His 56-homer season is better than Ken Griffey Jr.’s
Well, this is in a sense comparing the Pacific Northwest’s king salmon and its Dungeness crab – both are going to taste pretty good.
While 56 home runs is 56 home runs, regardless of when you hit it, rate statistics can at least partially allow us to compare which season is more impressive. And the offensive environment within which Raleigh is pushing 60 home runs makes his feat even more improbable.
Raleigh’s adjusted OPS – calibrated for league average, ballparks and other factors – is 169. When Junior slugged his 56 home runs in 1997 and 1998, his adjusted OPS were 165 and 150, respectively.
And when Griffey set the Mariners franchise record for homers that Raleigh has now matched, his home ballpark was the Kingdome, where baseballs flew out with abandon. Two years later, Safeco Field – now T-Mobile Park – opened up, suppressing offense for Junior – along with dozens of sluggers to come – and Griffey was traded to Cincinnati.
That’s not to whitewash Junior’s great seasons. His home run totals came just as baseball’s steroid era was kicking into high gear, although the home run rate did not spike until 1999 (1.14 per game compared to 1.04 in 1998). Seems like quite a few sluggers were “inspired” by the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa showdown.
Now, the home run rate is 1.16 per game, a product of the information revolution and the “three true outcomes” desires that remade how the game was played. Nonetheless, Raleigh is still outkicking the league average.
And there’s still some similarities between the two. Griffey was a Gold Glove center fielder and the AL MVP in 1997. Raleigh is poised to match that, two king fish leaving a mark on a franchise.
He was ‘just’ a third-round pick, never a Top 100 prospect
Raleigh never hit more than 13 home runs at Florida State, where he was better-regarded as a handler of pitchers and leader than power threat. The Mariners snagged him with the 90th overall pick in 2018, a third round led off by Kody Clemens.
Yet the power came quickly as Raleigh, already 22, hit a combined 29 homers in his first full professional season in 2019. The following season was canceled due to COVID-19, yet by 2021, Raleigh was still barely hanging among the top 10 Mariners prospects – and nowhere near an overall top 100.
Heck, the Mariners had five of ‘em – outfielders Jarred Kelenic and Julio Rodriguez, pitchers Logan Gilbert and Emerson Hancock and infielder Noelvi Marte.
By midseason 2021, though, Baseball America had moved Raleigh to No. 5 and seemed to sense something was coming.
“A switch-hitter, Raleigh has ironed out his righthanded swing to be a legitimate threat from both sides of the plate, and improved pitch recognition has helped him lay off high fastballs that previously gave him trouble,” the publication wrote.
He’d debut that July, hit an unremarkable two home runs in 47 games, yet by early 2022 was back in the bigs for good.
Just goes to show that for all the attention MLB’s draft now garners, the gold may take a while to pan out.