The Seattle Mariners had to make a move they have been dreading. Cal Raleigh has been placed on the 10-day injured list with a right oblique strain. It is the first IL stint of his MLB career, and it tells you everything you need to know about how badly he was hurting.
Raleigh has been trying to play through pain in his oblique for more than two weeks. He grimaced and grabbed at his right side while backing up a throw to home plate in the eighth inning Wednesday night against the Astros. He was pulled in the ninth for backup catcher Mitch Garver. The Mariners made the inevitable call on Thursday.
The numbers tell the story. Raleigh has just two hits in his last 49 plate appearances. Two. His season slash line has cratered to .161/.243/.317. For one of the best offensive catchers in baseball, those are not slumping numbers. Those are I am physically broken numbers.
Seattle should have done this two weeks ago. Asking Raleigh to grind through an oblique strain in mid-May is the kind of decision that bites you in October. Catchers cannot fake their way through this kind of injury. Every throw, every swing, every check swing tweaks it. The Mariners knew it. He knew it. They tried to gut it out anyway.
Now they have to deal with the fallout. Jhonny Pereda has been called up from Triple-A Tacoma to fill the roster spot. Pereda is a glove-first backup who has spent most of his career in the minors. He is not going to replace Raleigh’s offensive production. Nobody is.
Mitch Garver will absorb the bulk of the playing time behind the plate. Garver has been a solid contributor for the Mariners, but he has his own offensive struggles to work through. Pairing him with Pereda is a downgrade from the platoon Seattle has been running, but it should be defensively sound.
The bigger concern is timing. Raleigh will get a more thorough evaluation when the team returns to Seattle, but there is no immediate timetable for his return. Oblique strains are notoriously stubborn injuries. Players come back from them quickly only to reaggravate the muscle and miss extended time. The Mariners cannot afford that.
Seattle is hanging around in the AL West, but the lineup has been streaky all year. Julio Rodriguez is fine. Randy Arozarena is providing some power. But the offense lacks the kind of middle-of-the-order force that Raleigh brought before this injury knocked his bat completely off line.
The good news is that the IL stint might actually help him reset. Two weeks of rest, ice, and rehab will give the oblique time to heal properly. When Raleigh returns, the Mariners need a fully healthy version of the slugger who has been one of the best catchers in baseball over the last three seasons.
The bad news is that even a fully healthy Raleigh is going to need time to get his timing back. He has not had a productive at-bat in nearly three weeks. The Mariners are going to have to manage his return carefully, ease him back into game action, and accept that he might not look like himself again until late May or early June.
For a team trying to chase down the Rangers in the AL West, every day Raleigh is unavailable matters. Seattle needs him at his best. The Mariners can only hope this IL trip was the right move at the right time, even if it should have come weeks earlier than it did.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
