For anyone who engaged with MLB All-Star Week, the lasting image of Cal Raleigh is a ruddy-cheeked kid strutting about a yard with a baseball bat and declaring himself the Home Run Derby champion. The Raleigh of now, in all honesty, doesn't look all too different—still baby-faced with a generally pink mien—but time has given him the rare ability to achieve his childhood dreams.
He did, in fact, win the 2025 Home Run Derby (after squeaking by, less romantically, via a fraction of an inch and the the fuzzing of significant figures), the first catcher ever to do so. And though "I'm now the all-time MLB leader in single-season home runs by a primary catcher" would be a little bit more of a mouthful for a child to chant, he's done that too. On Sunday, the Mariners catcher hit two home runs in one game, bringing him to 49 home runs on the season, and breaking the record previously set by Kansas City's Salvador Perez in 2021.
The charm of Raleigh is that whatever greatness or sweetness he displays, it is inevitably also funny. Such is your lot in life when Jarred Kelenic dubs you "Big Dumper" in front of the general public; it will be repeated ad nauseam on national and away broadcasts, and every single time you do something significant which, if you are Cal Raleigh in the year 2025, is happening quite often. In a league where records are often laden with qualifiers, the catcher home run record is clean and honest. Setting aside the context of the West Sacramento Athletics—Seattle's opponent on Sunday—the way Raleigh achieved the record was about as clean and honest as it gets, too. He was fed two meatballs, and he crushed them.
First, Raleigh tied the record by taking a middle-middle four-seamer to deep left field in the very first inning of the game—
—and then, the inning immediately after, took a middle-middle change-up for another two-run home run to left field.
It would have been more poetic if the switch-hitting Raleigh hit one from each side of the plate, but you can't begrudge lefty power, particularly in T-Mobile Park. For those keeping track at home, Raleigh's first home run went 448 feet; the second went 412 feet.
After the Home Run Derby, Raleigh hit a slump, at least compared to his level earlier on in the season: Prior to yesterday's game, he was slashing .202/.275/.434 post-derby, which made him an about average hitter. (Add in yesterday's game, where he went 3-for-5 with two home runs, and his post-derby metrics improve significantly.) But even while his overall offensive production dropped, he was hitting homers; if he'd ruined his swing, that ruination took the shape of forgetting how to hit anything except for home runs. His 11 home runs in those 34 games would still be good for a 50-homer season. His 49 home runs so far still lead his competition in MLB this year. And, somehow, Raleigh still has 31 games remaining to extend the record, or even to reach the rarefied mark of 60 home runs.
All this, and as a switch hitter! While it would be nice to say that one side of Raleigh could make history on its own, Raleigh has been too well-rounded this year for that to be true. Lefty Raleigh has a 30-homer season on his own, and Righty Raleigh is just one away from 20.
Raleigh's performance has been so good this year that he's challenging Aaron Judge's recent hegemony over the American League MVP award. Obligatory WAR checks for the conflict-minded: Raleigh has 6.5 fWAR compared to Judge's 7.3 fWAR (Correction [2:40 p.m. ET]: As commenter Todd Debeikes notes, Raleigh and Judge are actually tied in fWAR, at 7.3), and 5.7 rWAR compared to Judge's 6.8 rWAR, lagging behind in both categories but not by so much a margin as to be a slam dunk. The Mariners and Judge's Yankees have the same number of wins so far this season; both teams, barring disaster, will make the playoffs. If Raleigh is to win, he'll probably need some defense-forward thinking, the full efforts of the catcher lobby, and a healthy dose of voter fatigue. But until the results roll around, we can all argue about it, and that's what's important.
