Why Cal Raleigh's Mariners breakout is for real this time, per the data

Amid one of the most miserable seasons we've ever seen from a star hitter, Cal Raleigh finally had a reason to celebrate on Monday night. The 2025 AL MVP runner-up went yard not once, not twice but three times in the Seattle Mariners' win over the Philadelphia Phillies — the first two of which came off of Cy Young candidate Zack Wheeler.

That's now five long balls in the last eight games for Raleigh, with a 1.548 OPS over that span. It's still far too early to be declaring victory, for either himself or his team; his season-long numbers remain very, very ugly (17 homers, .167/.282/.336 slash line, 87 wRC+), while Seattle remains six games under .500 and three games back of a playoff spot. But Monday night was the first time in a long time that Raleigh has looked like Big Dumper, and a look under the hood suggests his performance was much more than just one good night.

Here's why Mariners fans should be holding out hope that Raleigh is back to his old self.

What's gone wrong for Cal Raleigh in 2026 — and how he's fixing it

To determine whether Raleigh is well and truly fixed, we first hvae to understand just what broke in the first place. How did a guy who set the single-season record for homers from a catcher just a season ago suddenly turn into one of the worst hitters in the sport?

The answer, put simply: He stopped hitting the ball as hard. Raleigh hasn't been unlucky, and he hasn't experienced a physical decline or started swinging and missing all over the place; in fact, his contact and batted-ball profiles haven't changed much at all. He's just done way, way less damage on contact this year than he did in 2025.

Of course, telling you that a struggling hitter isn't hitting the ball as hard isn't exactly ground-breaking analysis. The real question is why. And the most likely answer comes down to one word: timing. All the evidence suggests that Raleigh's been just a tick later to the ball this season than he was last season.

Raleigh feasted on fastballs last season, but they've been his Kryptonite in 2026. We can also look at his attack direction, Statcast's measure of the horizontal direction in which a batter hits the ball.

For much of this season, Raleigh has been attacking the ball more towards center field or the other way than he did during his monster 2025 campaign. But look at the way the attack direction line plummets recently, suggesting that he's finally getting the ball out front more like he did when he was hitting 60 homers.

And look at the two homers he hit off of Wheeler: one on a 95-mph fastball at the top of the strike zone, and another in which he got out in front and hooked a hanging cutter.

That looks like the guy who set the league on fire last year, one who managed to optimize every bit of the contact he made and turn it into home-run power. It's a small sample, sure, but it feels like he's finally gotten the feel back for his swing, and that means the dingers could start coming in bunches. The only question now is whether it's dug the Mariners too deep a hole to climb out of.

Is Cal Raleigh's turnaround too little, too late for the Mariners?

Seattle has been arguably baseball's single biggest disappointment this season. But the on-paper talent has never been in question, and — with a hearty assist from a historically awful division and a wide-open race for the third AL Wild Card spot — there's still plenty of time to right the ship.

Raleigh getting back to his old self would go a long, long way toward doing just that, as would a hot streak from Julio Rodriguez, who also homered on Monday night and has been known to catch fire in the second half in the past. Those two would suddenly turn a struggling lineup into a force, which, combined with this always-strong rotation, would make the Mariners the class of the AL West again.

They also get some help from their schedule from here on in. After getting through this Phillies series, Seattle has just one more series remaining against a team currently above .500 — a three-game set with the Red Sox at Fenway at the end of August. Other than that, it's clear sailing: The Mariners have the easiest slate in baseball, one that features matchups against the Rockies, A's (twice) and Angels (twice) as well as divisional tilts against Texas and Houston. The M's fate is still in their hands, in other words, and no one wants to see this team in October if Raleigh is right again.

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