Cal Raleigh was the story of baseball in 2025.
It’s all pretty well known, now. He took MLB by storm with his “Big Dumper” nickname as he blasted 60 home runs for the Seattle Mariners.
It was the all-time record for a single-season by a catcher, by a switch-hitter, and by a Mariners player. There had been very few more impressive slugging seasons in baseball history.
And then the calendar turned to 2026.
It’s been a mighty struggle for Raleigh, and the Mariners have fallen off the pace in line with that.
There’s just a bit of good news, though. Raleigh seems to be heating up.
Take Friday night — he hit his 13th home run since the All-Star Break. In a much larger sample before that, he didn’t have that many homers.
Cal Raleigh now has 12 home runs since the All-Star break š„
He had just 9 prior to the mid-summer classic š²
šŗ @MLB pic.twitter.com/sRHDLMZWAI
ā ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) September 5, 2026
It may be too late to save the Mariners, but Raleigh is doing his best to try.
He’s also doing what he can to encourage Seattle that he’ll be ready to have a more normal-level Raleigh season in 2027.
Cal Raleigh Recent Stats
For the season, Raleigh is still just hitting .176 with a .662 OPS. That’s a lot better than it was, though.
The trend really started two-plus weeks ago, so the easiest way to look at this is to take Raleigh’s official MLB.com stats starting with his last 15 games.
In his last 15 games, Raleigh is batting .306 with a 1.281 OPS. He has eight home runs in that span, driving in 14 runs and scoring 12 runs. He’s walked 10 times and struck out 15 in those 15 games.
Narrowing it down more specifically, Raleigh is still hot in his last seven games, with three home runs, a .308 average and a .769 slugging percentage.
Cal Raleigh’s Early Struggles
If we look by month, it tells the story a bit.
Raleigh hit .143 in March, then .202 in April.
In an injury-plagued May, Raleigh batted just .056. It was .174 in June and .165 in July.
He started to heat up just a tad in August, with a .195 batting average and his first OPS in a month above .713 — he was at .877 OPS for August.
September is obviously short so far, but Raleigh has a 1.179 OPS for the month in the early going.
The Mariners haven’t heated up quite as well as Raleigh, though. They’re 66-76, and that puts them 7.0-games back in the AL West Division. They won’t be close enough to catch a wild card, so they’d simply have to get red hot to chase down the division.
Raleigh is finally doing his part, even if it turns out to be a little too late to save the Mariners from sinking.
Mariners’ Cal Raleigh Continues Major Change