Cal Raleigh's 0-for-25 Slump: A Historic Fall After an Even More Historic Season
There is a particular cruelty to watching a record-breaker come undone. Cal Raleigh spent the 2025 season rewriting baseball history as the Seattle Mariners' catcher — slugging 60 home runs, entering a list with Roger Maris and Aaron Judge, becoming the first switch-hitter and first catcher ever to reach that threshold. Now, less than six weeks into the 2026 season, Raleigh hasn't recorded a hit since April 27 and carries one of the worst batting averages among all qualified hitters in Major League Baseball. The contrast isn't just jarring — it's the kind of statistical whiplash that generates serious questions about whether his 2025 was a peak or an aberration.
As of May 9, 2026, Raleigh is mired in an 0-for-25 hitless skid, including an 0-for-21 stretch during which he struck out 11 times — the kind of run that gets flagged as one of the worst observed for any player of his caliber. He hasn't started three of the Mariners' last six games. The man who made history is now a cautionary tale about how quickly elite performance can evaporate in baseball.
The 2025 Season That Made Raleigh a Legend
To understand why Raleigh's 2026 struggles carry such weight, you have to appreciate the full scope of what he did just one year ago. In 2025, Raleigh hit 60 home runs — a number so large it sits in rarefied company. Only Roger Maris (1961) and Aaron Judge (2022) had ever hit 60 home runs in an American League season before Raleigh. He became the third AL player ever to reach that mark.
But the historical significance goes beyond the raw number. Raleigh did it as a switch-hitter, the first in MLB history to accomplish that feat. He also did it as a catcher — a position so physically demanding that most catchers peak offensively in their late 20s before the wear of the position erodes their bat. No catcher in baseball history had ever hit 60 home runs in a season. The combination made Raleigh's 2025 genuinely unprecedented.
The leap from 2024 to 2025 was itself remarkable. His OPS jumped by .200 points between those two seasons, and his home run total nearly doubled. In 2024, Raleigh was valued primarily for his glove — he won the Platinum Glove Award that year as a defense-first catcher with developing power. By the end of 2025, the power had fully arrived, and then some.
What Raleigh's Slump Actually Looks Like
An 0-for-25 slump sounds bad on its face. The underlying mechanics reveal something more troubling. Analysis of Raleigh's 2026 struggles points to a fundamental breakdown in his ability to make hard contact. He is rolling over pitches — particularly on the inner half — and popping up at a rate that suggests something is genuinely off with his swing mechanics, his timing, or both.
Hard contact rate is the stat that matters most for a power hitter like Raleigh. A slugger who makes soft contact isn't just getting fewer hits — he's failing to generate the exit velocity that makes him dangerous even when he doesn't get a hit. Ground balls and weak pop-ups off what should be drive pitches are the signature of a hitter who is either fooled by velocity, off-balance at the plate, or fighting something mechanically that isn't visible to the naked eye.
The strikeout numbers amplify the concern. Eleven strikeouts in a 21-at-bat window is a rate that suggests pitchers have found a pattern against him that he hasn't yet solved. In 2025, Raleigh was a hitter who could punish pitchers for any mistake in his zone. In 2026, he is not punishing mistakes — and he is chasing pitches out of his zone at a rate that suggests his recognition is also suffering.
The cumulative result: Raleigh currently carries the third-lowest batting average among all qualified MLB hitters in 2026. That's not an early-season blip — that's a persistent pattern now deep enough to qualify for leaderboard inclusion.
Warning Signs Emerged Before the Season Even Started
The red flags didn't appear in April. They surfaced during spring training at the World Baseball Classic, where Raleigh represented the United States. Across three WBC games, Raleigh went 0-for-9 — nine hitless at-bats without a single base knock. The coaching staff responded by benching him in favor of Will Smith, a decision that carried real meaning given Raleigh's status as one of the game's premier offensive catchers.
Getting benched at the WBC for an 0-for-9 performance is not a routine spring training outcome for a player who hit 60 home runs the previous year. It suggested that either the mechanical issues were already present, pitchers had already identified and were exploiting a vulnerability, or the physical demands of catching at an elite level were already showing up in his bat. Possibly all three.
That WBC performance now looks like a preview of the 2026 regular season rather than a statistical blip. When the same patterns — hitlessness, weak contact, poor recognition — that appeared in spring training have extended well into May, the conversation shifts from "early slump" to "something is genuinely wrong."
The Mariners' Broader Context Makes This Worse
Raleigh's struggles don't exist in a vacuum. The Mariners' offensive woes in 2026 extend beyond their star catcher, but Raleigh was supposed to be the anchor of a lineup that needed a reliable middle-of-the-order presence. His absence from the stat sheet — and increasingly from the lineup, with three starts skipped in the team's last six games — removes the one bat that was supposed to compensate for Seattle's perpetually pitcher-friendly home environment.
T-Mobile Park has long been one of the most suppressive ballparks in baseball for hitters. The marine air, the dimensions, the atmospheric conditions — they all work against offense. In that context, a catcher who can hit 60 home runs is not just a good player; he's a franchise-level asset who changes how opposing teams have to approach the entire Seattle lineup. When he's not hitting, the Mariners don't have an obvious fallback.
The front office decision-making also looms over this situation. Last offseason, the Mariners traded Harry Ford — the catcher viewed as Raleigh's long-term successor — to the Washington Nationals. That deal made sense at the time as a vote of confidence in Raleigh's continued production. But if Raleigh's 2025 was a career-peak outlier rather than a new baseline, the team gave away organizational depth at a premium position for a version of Raleigh that may not exist.
Is This a Mechanical Fix or Something Deeper?
This is the question that will define Raleigh's 2026 season and potentially the next phase of his career. There are two competing explanations for what's happening, and they have very different long-term implications.
The optimistic read: Raleigh has a correctable mechanical flaw. His hands are too slow to the ball, his shoulder is flying open, his load timing is off — something specific and fixable that pitchers identified in the WBC and have been exploiting ever since. Under this theory, a mechanical adjustment gets him back on track, and the Mariners get most of their 2025 catcher back by June.
The pessimistic read: The 2025 season was a statistical outlier — a career year driven by the same kind of unsustainable batted-ball luck and sequencing that can inflate any power hitter's numbers for a single season. His OPS jumping .200 points in one year was extraordinary; such jumps often don't hold. Under this theory, Raleigh's 2026 is a regression toward something closer to his pre-2025 mean, and the 60-home-run season was the exception rather than the standard.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle — a hitter who genuinely improved but who is also dealing with a specific mechanical issue that has turned a moderate correction into a severe slump. But the longer the skid continues without resolution, the more the pessimistic read gains credibility.
What This Means for Raleigh, the Mariners, and Power Hitter Expectations
Raleigh's situation is a useful lens for thinking about how baseball evaluates historic seasons. When a player breaks a record or achieves something unprecedented, there's an immediate pressure to declare them transformed — a new version of themselves operating at a higher tier. Sometimes that's true. Aaron Judge hitting 62 home runs in 2022 was consistent with what he'd shown before and after. Roger Maris in 1961, by contrast, never approached those numbers again.
For Raleigh, the honest answer is that a 60-home-run season from a catcher was so far outside historical norms that treating it as a new baseline was always going to be a leap of faith. Catchers don't hit 60 home runs. Raleigh did it once. The question was always whether "once" meant "can do it again" or "did it once." Early 2026 is not providing reassuring answers.
For the Mariners, the stakes are significant. They built their 2026 offensive identity around Raleigh being a 45-plus home run threat even if he didn't repeat 60. His absence from the lineup — and his absence from the hit column — leaves a hole that a pitcher-friendly park cannot compensate for. If the slump extends past Memorial Day without mechanical correction, Seattle's postseason calculus changes substantially.
There's also a broader lesson here for how fans and analysts should process historic individual seasons. Record-breaking performances in baseball — especially those involving numbers that have never been reached before — deserve skepticism about repeatability even while they're celebrated. The history of the sport is littered with single-season peaks that never came close to repeating.
Frequently Asked Questions About Cal Raleigh's 2026 Slump
When did Cal Raleigh last get a hit in 2026?
Raleigh's last recorded hit was on April 27, 2026. Since then, he has gone 0-for-25 at the plate, a skid that includes a particularly brutal 0-for-21 stretch during which he struck out 11 times.
How many home runs did Cal Raleigh hit in 2025?
Raleigh hit 60 home runs in the 2025 season, becoming just the third American League player to ever reach that number, joining Roger Maris (1961) and Aaron Judge (2022). He was also the first switch-hitter and first catcher in MLB history to hit 60 home runs in a single season.
Is Cal Raleigh still playing for the Seattle Mariners in 2026?
Yes, Raleigh remains the Mariners' catcher in 2026. However, he did not start three of Seattle's last six games, suggesting the team is managing his playing time as the slump continues.
What is causing Cal Raleigh's hitting struggles in 2026?
The primary identified issue is an inability to make hard contact. Raleigh is rolling over pitches and popping up at a higher rate than in 2025, which suggests either a mechanical flaw in his swing, timing issues, or pitchers successfully exploiting a vulnerability they identified as early as the World Baseball Classic in spring training.
Who did the Mariners trade away instead of keeping Cal Raleigh?
The Mariners traded Harry Ford — the catcher who had been projected as Raleigh's long-term successor — to the Washington Nationals last offseason. That trade was made with the expectation that Raleigh would continue producing at an elite level.
Was Cal Raleigh benched before the 2026 regular season?
Yes. At the World Baseball Classic during spring training, Raleigh went 0-for-9 across three games and was subsequently benched in favor of Will Smith. That hitless stretch now reads as a preview of the struggles that carried into the regular season.
Conclusion: Waiting to See Which Cal Raleigh Exists
The 2026 season is, at this point, an open question about identity. Is Cal Raleigh the transcendent hitter who slugged 60 home runs in 2025 and is temporarily buried under a correctable mechanical issue? Or is he a very good defensive catcher with genuine power who happened to have one extraordinary outlier season that set unrealistic expectations for everything that followed?
An 0-for-25 skid through May 9 doesn't answer that question definitively, but it demands that it be asked seriously. The warning signs from the WBC, the mechanical breakdown in hard contact, the skipped starts — none of these are consistent with a hitter who has simply hit a cold streak. They suggest something more systematic, and they suggest it has been building since before the season started.
The next six weeks will be telling. If Raleigh's mechanics get corrected and he returns to being the dangerous middle-of-the-order presence that made Seattle's lineup function, then this May slump becomes a footnote in an otherwise remarkable career arc. If the slump persists, the conversation about whether 2025 was real becomes unavoidable — and the Mariners' season likely goes with it.
For now, the only certainty is that baseball is humbling, history is hard to repeat, and the gap between 60 home runs and 0-for-25 is a reminder that no player — however historic — is immune to the game turning on them.
