Cal Raleigh isn’t hiding from what’s happening in Seattle. The Mariners catcher, who hit 60 home runs last year and finished second in the AL MVP voting, is having the worst season of his career and he knows exactly whose fault it is.
“It’s not good. We’re not playing well. That starts with me. I’m awful,” Raleigh told reporters after Tuesday’s loss to the New York Yankees.
The numbers back him up in the worst way. Raleigh is hitting .159 with 12 home runs and 43 RBI entering Wednesday. Last year he was one of the most feared power hitters in baseball. This year he’s a below-replacement bat behind the plate for a team that needs every run it can find.
The Mariners are 56-64. They’ve lost five straight games. They just got swept at home by the Tampa Bay Rays and now they’ve dropped the opener of a Yankees series in the Bronx.
Seattle sits four games back of the final American League Wild Card spot and 4.5 games back of first place in the AL West. That’s the small miracle here. The Astros and Rangers are both hovering around .500 and neither has run away with the division, so the Mariners are still technically alive.
Raleigh’s collapse has been the story of the summer for this team. He went through a career-worst 0-for-36 slump in May that only ended after he took a shower in his full uniform in a bit of desperation superstition. He then started to look like himself for a couple of stretches before falling right back into the same hole.
Just one hit in the last five games. That’s not a slump, that’s a full-blown regression, and it’s coming from a guy who was in the MVP conversation less than a year ago.
You can point to a few things. Regression from a 60-homer season was inevitable. Catchers wear down as the summer grinds on. The strike zone hasn’t been friendly to Raleigh in certain counts. All fair.
But the harder truth is that Seattle built its offense around Raleigh being the middle of the order thumper. When he doesn’t produce, the whole thing falls apart. Julio Rodriguez has been up and down. The corner outfield spots haven’t provided consistent production. The Mariners have needed Raleigh to be Raleigh and he simply hasn’t been.
The good news, if you want to find any, is that Seattle played in the ALCS last October. They know how to win big games when the roster is right. The pitching, led by Logan Gilbert and George Kirby, is still capable of carrying this team through a September run.
They need Raleigh to snap out of it, though. There’s no other bat on this roster that can be the fear factor in the middle of a lineup during a playoff race. If he keeps hitting .159, Seattle’s postseason hopes die quietly over the next month.
Raleigh took the blame. Now he has to do something about it.
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.
