From 60 homers to 0-for-May? Explaining Raleigh's puzzling slump

A year ago, Cal Raleigh had something like the most incredible season by a catcher of all time, hitting 60 homers and driving in 125, while breaking more than a few dinger marks along the way. (Most by a catcher. Most by a Mariner. Most by a switch-hitter. Most by a switch-hitting Mariners catcher, probably.) He had a strong case to win the AL MVP Award, and that he finished a close second was only because Aaron Judge had a pretty incredible season himself.

This year … well.

This year, Raleigh needed eight games in May just to collect his first hit of the month. He entered Tuesday's game in Houston having managed just two walks in 30 times to the plate. On Tuesday, he walked, struck out and flied out in his first three plate appearances before breaking the slump with hits in his last two at-bats -- going two weeks between hits, dating back to a homer on April 27 against Minnesota. That adds up to 43 consecutive plate appearances without a hit. It was the longest active streak in baseball, by a lot, and was just a few more bad days from being the longest single-season run of the 21st century, an ignominious mark currently held by former Marlins outfielder Justin Ruggiano, who walked up to the plate 51 times in a row without a hit back in the summer of 2013.

Even with the two hits, Raleigh's hitting just .166/.249/.325, and while the batting average isn’t the story here – even last year, he hit just .247 and, again, could have been the AL MVP – it’s hard to talk around .166, too.

More importantly, no regular player has seen their OPS drop by more from 2025 to '26 than Raleigh's 384-point gap. Only one player has seen their hard-hit drop by as much (50% to 29%). We could just keep listing these things off. There’s not a lot good happening here.

After a season in which almost everything went right, beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, to something like 99th-percentile best-case outcome, you had to expect that the follow-up would never quite live up to that. But this isn’t just "an expected return to established norms," either. This has been "he’s been one of baseball’s weakest hitters."

Raleigh isn’t the only Mariners hitter struggling during a disappointing 21-22 start, to be clear; there’s plenty of blame to go around. But he’s the only one who hit 60 homers last year, too. What on Earth is happening here?

(All numbers below are entering Tuesday night's game.)

Before we get deep into the good (well, bad) stuff, let’s get three of the quick ones right out of the way, the first things that people tend to look toward:

1. Is it bad luck? Not really. A little, to be sure, because you wouldn't be 0-for-May if a blooper had fallen in or a grounder had found its way through the infield. But it's not really this. Put another way, Raleigh is underperforming his expected stats by a small amount, but the expected stats themselves are down by a huge amount.

2. Is it a slower bat? Also not really. His bat speed of 74.7 mph is barely off last year’s 75.2 mph and even if “dropping from the 89th percentile to the 82nd” is technically a decline, it’s also better than more than 80% of the rest of the sport.

3. Is it strikeouts? Maybe a little. Last year, Raleigh struck out 27% of the time. This year, it’s 31% of the time. That is, indeed, more. But it’s not enough to explain all this, either. In a world where James Wood (31%), Kyle Schwarber (32%), and Munetaka Murakami (35%) can all whiff as much as Raleigh or more and likely still find themselves headed to the All-Star Game, this can’t just be it.

So we’re left with “he’s earned most of what he’s got,” but also “it’s not really about striking out more and he hasn’t really lost bat speed while doing it,” and where does that really leave us? With more questions and not enough answers.

It can, really, be boiled down to one very simple yet difficult-to-explain factor: He’s just not hitting the ball all that hard.

Last year, Raleigh was 36th on the hard-hit rate list, similar to well-regarded sluggers like Mike Trout, Drake Baldwin, and Gunnar Henderson. This year, he’s 246th, looking upward at far lighter hitters like TJ Friedl, Jacob Young, and Joey Ortiz. He’s not putting it on the ground all that much more or less. He’s still putting it in the air at a high rate, though slightly less than last year. It’s almost entirely this. When he makes contact, it’s worse contact.

“You’ve really cracked the case here, Sherlock,” would be an appropriate response, because yes, this would certainly explain how an elite slugger might have lost some of that elite slug. It’s the "how" that gets a little tricky, though. By all indications, it appears to be about one simple word: timing. The timing is off.

That can be expressed in a few different ways. For one thing, Raleigh is hitting an almost impossible .069/.156/.172 on pitches over 95 mph, obviously one of baseball’s weakest marks. If your bat speed isn't down, but you can't catch up to velocity, then something has to be off when your bat gets to the impact zone.

For another, you can clearly see that he’s letting the ball get deeper. Last year, when we broke down what was behind that historic homer pace, a big part of the story was that as a pull-oriented slugger, he was catching the ball out in front further than anyone from the right side, and more than most from the left side.

While he’s still extreme on both sides of the plate – really, that’s almost impossible for a hitter with this profile to change – he’s catching it two inches deeper than he was previously, too. That may not sound like a lot, but it can mean the difference between squaring it up or not, and would easily be something created by late timing.

On Monday, MLB Network’s Harold Reynolds – a 10-year Mariner himself – broke down Raleigh’s swing and came to a similar conclusion, focusing specifically on his foot being slightly slower to start the leg kick. “That’s his problem right now,” Reynolds expressed. “Everything is late.”

The numbers go even further: Raleigh has widened his stance, on both sides of the plate, by more than four inches, from last year’s 24.8 inches between feet to this year’s 29.2 inches. That’s not inherently good or bad, but if you’re looking for different, then that’s indeed different.

It’s also true that Raleigh may not be at 100 percent right now, having missed three games earlier this month with “right side discomfort,” and a big chunk of that May oh-fer has come since his return – 25 plate appearances, to be exact. It’s also true that he was hitting .186/.272/.380 before that, too, making it hard to pin this struggle mostly or entirely on that.

But it’s further the case that in late April, Raleigh did get on a brief hot stretch, homering three games in a row between April 20-22 and adding two more from April 26-27 – yes, the most recent hit he’s had – prior to another 15 hitless plate appearances before that side injury. That’s because timing isn’t a lack of skill or a desertion of talent; it’s the kind of thing that can appear as quickly as it disappears.

It could be as simple, too, as “Raleigh played more baseball last year than any catcher in history ever has,” given the 759 combined plate appearances he took in the regular season and postseason, well more than the previous record of 718 by Thurman Munson in 1978. (It’s probably not “the World Baseball Classic broke his swing,” an excuse which doesn’t really fly given that fellow competitors like Luis Arraez, Bryce Harper, Junior Caminero, Schwarber, and Judge are off to pretty excellent starts themselves.)

If there’s good news for Raleigh and the Mariners, it might be in the little-remembered Ruggiano, who had a mostly forgettable Mariners stint at the start of a mostly forgettable 2015 season, the one that got GM Jack Zduriencik fired and soon led to the hiring of current president of baseball ops Jerry Dipoto.

As we noted above, Ruggiano had that brutal stretch for the Marlins in 2013, during which he went 51 consecutive plate appearances with just a few walks and zero hits. That ended with a three-hit game on Aug. 14, and Ruggiano – a far less accomplished hitter than Raleigh – hit .285/.354/.492 over the remainder of the season. He was Miami's second-best hitter behind only Giancarlo Stanton over the final six weeks, actually.

It really can turn around that fast. That's the good news, that this could really end any day, because it's not like Raleigh forgot how to hit. If this is really about the timing being off, then the only timing that matters here is when it comes back around. It could be before you know it.