The year Cal Raleigh became more than a nickname

Jarred Kelenic was once the Mariners prospect fans waited years for, the centerpiece of the trade that sent Robinson Canó and Edwin Díaz to the Mets. His big-league career never took off, but he left behind one lasting mark on Seattle lore: a single tweet that accidentally helped create a legend.

With this tweet, Cal Raleigh went from a relatively unknown player to the owner of a nickname that prompted one unavoidable question: “Does he have a huge ass or something? Now that's an origin story. And unlike Kelenic's, this one has led to one of the great stories in the history of the Mariners and Major League Baseball.

A cult hero Mariners fans never laughed off

Any self-respecting Mariners fan knows that Cal Raleigh has always been more than just a guy with a funny nickname. As a switch-hitter with power and developing defensive skills, he was a legit catching prospect by the time Kelenic crashed his debut, and everything he did in the subsequent three years made him a cult hero in the Pacific Northwest.

Raleigh clinched Mariners icon status with a walk-off homer in September 2022 that finally ended a playoff drought, which extended back to 2001. That was one of 27 bombs he hit that year, to be followed by 30 in 2023 and 34 in 2024. He also won a Platinum Glove in 2024, giving Mariners fans all the fuel they needed to stan for him as MLB's best catcher. Through it all, the guy with the big ass did not become, well, a big ass.

How Mariners fans turned a nickname into pride

Though Raleigh originally hated his "Big Dumper" sobriquet, he has put on a masterclass in being a good sport about it. It's how Mariners fans got "Big Dumper Trucking" and a bobblehead that would render even Sir Mix-a-Lot speechless. The dude even accepted an endorsement deal from Honey Bucket this year — look them up next time nature calls.

Simultaneously, though, nobody in Seattle ever mistook Raleigh for T-Mobile Park's resident jester. He has always wanted exactly what Mariners have been wanting since 1977: to win it all.

In 2023, Raleigh went so far as to call out his own bosses over how they were running the team. And this spring, he refused to back down even when a Brinks truck backed up. He wouldn't sign a $105 million contract offer until the front office convinced him of its plans.

Cut to today, and Raleigh looks every bit like a triumphant champion for the fanbase. The Mariners won 90 games this year and, despite how it ended, still made it closer to the World Series than ever before. Jerry Dipoto can take a bow as well, as this year's success came from the core that he methodically constructed, with a little help from trade splashes on Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez.

Of course, it also helps when your franchise catcher hits 65 dang balls over the fence.

When Cal Raleigh stopped being local

Even before the 2025 season began, you could feel a change in the winds for Raleigh's place in Major League Baseball. Praise for him suddenly seemed to be everywhere, and projection systems were spitting out comps to Hall of Famers and prophecies of an MVP-winning season.

Stuff like this is fun, yet easy to forget with a shrug. But when the season began, Raleigh quickly started raking. He had 22 home runs by the end of May, and 33 by the end of June. History really came into focus at the All-Star break, where his 38 home runs put him one shy of the first-half record set by Barry Bonds in 2001.

No longer merely a cult hero in Seattle, Raleigh was suddenly the headliner for the Home Run Derby in Atlanta. And with his dad pitching to him 20 years after recording a homemade video of his son goofily proclaiming "I'm the Home Run Derby champ," the whole thing had Hallmark energy. Then Raleigh resumed his regularly scheduled programming of hitting tanks, and actually became the Home Run Derby champ.

Between all of that and a profile in GQ (of all places) that dropped during the All-Star break, mid-July felt like the point when the spell might finally break and Raleigh would settle back into life as a local hero. When his bat cooled in July and early August, you could swear it was happening.

Instead, Raleigh got hot again and ended up smashing several single-season home run records:

• Home runs by a catcher: 48 by Salvador Perez in 2021
• Home runs by a switch-hitter: 54 by Mickey Mantle in 1961
• Home runs by a Mariner: 56 by Ken Griffey Jr. in 1997 and 1998

Once an impossible dream, a 60-homer season felt inevitable. And on Sept. 24, Raleigh managed to steal the spotlight even from the Mariners, clinching their first AL West title in 24 years. All it took was his 59th and 60th homers.

Raleigh became only the seventh player to hit 60 homers in a season, joining Babe Ruth and Roger Maris of classic vintage and Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Aaron Judge of recent vintage.

Beyond the fact that none of the latter four played catcher, the sheer unlikelihood of Raleigh joining them is all in the contrast of physiques. The versions of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds and Judge that joined the 60-homer club resembled Greek Gods, exquisite specimens carved from marble and infused with eldritch power.

Raleigh? He's more of a "Farva from Super Troopers" type.

Raleigh's journey to the 60-homer club was littered with beaten odds. He wasn't even seen as good enough to make his high school team. After a successful college career at Florida State, he was still only rated by Baseball America as the No. 78 prospect in the 2018 draft class. And even after excelling in the minors, at no point did Raleigh crack any top-100 prospect lists.

The "worked his ass off" joke writes itself, yet even Raleigh seemed in disbelief that his ongoing project of self-improvement would lead to a 60-homer season. And by the time he got there, the next target was Judge's AL-record 62 homers from 2022.

Yet, the general vibe among Mariners fans was that 62 was more of a nice-to-have. It was a case of following Raleigh's lead after Seattle clinched a playoff berth on September 23, when he quoted Jake Taylor of Major League: "Might as well go win the whole f---ing thing."

This, obviously, did not happen. Even though Raleigh contributed five more homers to the cause in the playoffs, the Mariners fell one win short of the World Series. It wasn't the first time the team had broken hearts in the Pacific Northwest, but this one truly hit different.

Why it still felt like Cal Raleigh’s world

So why does it still feel like we're living in Raleigh's world? Maybe it has to do with his loss to Judge in the AL MVP race, which only seemed to galvanize support for Raleigh's cause all over again. Or, maybe it's because this simply is Raleigh's world now.

He was not among the top athletes, but it feels impossible to separate his superstar ascent from how the Mariners were the No. 1 trending sports team on Google in 2025. In this attention economy, there's no way that would have happened if the Mariners were just another MLB contender. What they had that others didn't was, obviously, "Big Dumper."

If Cal Raleigh belongs to everyone now, so be it. Just don't forget that he belonged to Seattle first, and that he'll never mean as much anywhere else as he does there.

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