Cal Raleigh opened this season with a line that would have looked more like a bad stretch in April than the start of a campaign from one of the Mariners’ most important hitters:.143/.236/.245 over his first 55 plate appearances, with one home run, a 51 wRC+ and a strikeout rate of 38.2%.
That is not how Raleigh has been defined since he solidified himself as a star in 2022, but it is how his year has begun, and the numbers land hard because they come after a 2025 in which he looked like the kind of centerpiece a club can build around. Seattle did not need that version of Raleigh to repeat as AL West champions this year, but it is the one the team and its fans have come to expect.
The comparison to his first big-league taste in 2021 is hard to miss. Back then, Raleigh went.180/.223/.309 in his first 148 plate appearances across 47 games, posted a 46 wRC+ and struck out 35.1% of the time while drawing just seven walks. He rebounded after that rough entry and became the player Seattle trusts now, which is why this opening slump reads less like a complete surprise than a reminder that even proven hitters can start cold.
There are still reasons to believe the swing itself is not broken. Raleigh’s average bat speed is 74.7 mph, in line with where it sat a season ago, and his swing path tilt has been around 33-35 degrees over the past two years between his lefty and righty swings. That is a little different from the roughly 31-degree angle he carried in 2023, but it remains close to the MLB average of 32 degrees.
The tension for Seattle is that the production has not matched the profile. Raleigh’s own blunt version of the situation was even harsher: he described “The Big Dumper is flattening out (boos) to get back to his prior success (cheers),” and said the expectations now loom even larger because the Big Dumper is “mucked up and mired in a.143/.236/.245 over his first 55 PAs this year, a 51 wRC+, and a funny-but-not-ha-ha-funny bad 38.2% punchout rate.”
That is the line between a slow start and a real concern. Raleigh has already shown he can climb out of this kind of beginning, and the Mariners have already shown they can keep winning without his best bat for a stretch, as reflected in Mariners Score Repeat AL West Title Even as Cal Raleigh Slumps Early. What happens next is whether the swing data and the track record meet the pressure of expectations before the slump starts to look less like noise and more like a problem.
