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2 hours ago
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It's probably nothing to be alarmed about.
But the early going of this new baseball season for Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh has come with some concerns.
He struggled in the World Baseball Classic with Team USA and was benched.
And now to begin the regular season with the Mariners, he's 1-for-11 with nine strikeouts and two walks.
Nine strikeouts in 11 at bats, no matter when it happens over the season, is not a good sign.
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Is something wrong with Cal Raleigh?
There likely isn't anything specifically wrong with Raleigh.
It's early, and sample sizes are small.
This rough start does remind Seattle fans, though, that Raleigh's 2025 campaign of 60 home runs and tons of magic was a high-water mark. He almost certainly will never approach those heights again. It was an absurd outlier among every catcher hitting season ever.
Even last season, as Raleigh did that, he struck out a career-high 188 times. There are at bats when the switch-hitter simply doesn't connect.
Right now in the early going of the 2026 MLB season, Raleigh is frequently failing to connect. It doesn't mean it'll continue all season, no. But it does exemplify that hitting is hard, and if Raleigh is even just slightly less locked in than he was a season ago, he could move back toward the 30-HR level that he was in 2023 and 2024, rather than his history of last season.
Mariners fans and Raleigh would all like to see him snap out of this early funk, and he might do so very soon.
For now, though, he's definitely slumping, at least as much as someone can be in a small sample size.
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