It’s probably nothing to be alarmed about.
But the early going of this new baseball season for Cal Raleigh has come with some concerns for the Mariners catcher.
He struggled in the World Baseball Classic with Team USA and got benched.
Now to start the regular season with Seattle, 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 – isn’t a good sign.
There likely isn’t anything specifically wrong with Raleigh.
It’s early, and sample sizes are small.
The Reality Check
This rough start does remind Seattle fans that Raleigh’s 2025 campaign of 60 home runs and tons of magic was a high-water mark. He almost certainly won’t approach those heights again. It was an absurd outlier among every catcher hitting season ever.
Even during that season, as Raleigh was doing all that damage, 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 season, Raleigh’s frequently failing to connect. It doesn’t mean it’ll continue all season, no. But it does show that hitting’s hard, and if Raleigh’s 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 historic performance 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.
