Cal Raleigh still has targets left to hit, and none of them will carry more resonance than the one that wouldn't actually break any kind of record. We’re talking about 60 homers, because even though that won’t be 73 (Barry Bonds’s single-season record from 2001) or 62 (Aaron Judge’s American League record from 2022), it’s still sixty home runs. It’s been done only nine times by six hitters, and six of those nine times came in a four-season span from 1998-2001. The other three times came from Yankees outfielders. That’s it. Ever.
All of which means that 60 homers might be only one more than 59, but it matters about a million times more – particularly coming from A) a catcher who B) plays in one of baseball’s most difficult hitting environments.
Raleigh, entering play Tuesday evening, has 53 homers – including three in his last six games. The Mariners, two games out of first place in the AL West and in possession of the third Wild Card spot, have a ton to play for. What’s the path for Big Dumper to reach that Big Number?
The first question: Can he hit 7 in 18?
The various projection systems all peg him for four or five additional homers. That won’t do it. So the first thing to ask is: are we asking the impossible? If he’s never hit seven in 18 games before, it’s not realistic to ask for it now.
Not a problem, that. Raleigh has hit at least seven in an 18-game span in each of the last four seasons, reaching as many as 11 homers in 18 games in late May through early June. Even over his last 18 games, when he hasn’t exactly been able to sustain his early-season excellence (.191/.313/.471), Raleigh still has six homers.
He needs one every 2 1/2 games. Over the course of the season to date, he’s hit one … every 2 1/2 games. Doable!
That’s the easy part. Let’s make it more difficult.
Who will he have to face – and where?
The Mariners have a dozen home games left, against the Cardinals, Angels, Rockies, and Dodgers; they have one remaining road trip, traveling through Kansas City and Houston.
According to Statcast’s park factors, Kansas City ranks as the third-hardest home run park this year, Houston is 12th, and Seattle is a surprising middle of the pack – although, as always, T-Mobile inflates strikeouts and makes all sorts of other offense more difficult to get to. Raleigh has five career homers in Houston (one this year), and four in Kansas City, which the Mariners have not yet visited this season.
While it’s obviously hard to know who will be on the mound at any given time, the post-Deadline pitching leaderboards show that the road versions of the Cardinals, Angels and Rockies are all among the eight most homer-friendly pitching staffs in the game, while the Dodgers, for all their other issues, have had little trouble keeping the ball in the yard. The Royals, as befits their reputation, have allowed the (tied) third-fewest homers at home since the Deadline.
That all seems like a mixed bag of favorable and unfavorable parks and pitchers, except …
… what if park factors don’t apply to Raleigh?
OK, that’s intentionally inflammatory. Of course they do. They apply to everyone. But there is something interesting happening here, and not just that Raleigh has a similar number of homers in Seattle (25) as he does on the road (28). (Which is not to say that T-Mobile hasn’t affected him; his OPS is indeed 111 points stronger on the road.)
You’ve assuredly seen the Statcast tool that takes the trajectory of a batted ball, compares it to all the various walls and distances in other parks, and lets you know how many other parks it would have been out of:
Using the version that’s adjusted for environment, Raleigh shows up with the largest gap between actual homers (53) and expected homers (45) in the game. It’s the largest gap of anyone since 2019, a particularly homer-friendly season. Don’t take that to be “good luck,” because it’s not, really; he’d hardly be the first hitter to take advantage of the nets in Wrigley Field, as he did in June for a “1 of 30.”
Nor is it really needle-moving – though entertaining to watch – the time in Anaheim when Jo Adell couldn’t complete what seemed like a makeable catch, only for the ball to sneak above the yellow line for a homer (which itself would have not been a homer prior to a 2018 rule change at the park).
So what’s happening here? As we got into in May when first breaking down Raleigh’s incredible start, he’s putting nearly 40% of his batted balls into the air, pull-side, which tops the last three Isaac Paredes seasons for the highest pulled-air rate of anyone with 250 batted balls in the entire pitch-tracking era (2008-pres.), which might possibly also make it the highest rate ever.
As MLB.com’s Tom Tango wrote recently when looking into this, comparing Raleigh to Judge, “it means Raleigh timed his batted balls to the right ballpark on the right date.” In other words, while the Adell play was maybe a little fluky, being a switch-hitter with an elite ability to pull the ball hard in the air opens up some opportunities to sneak balls over fences that most other hitters can’t quite access.
It’s easy to see here, as Raleigh gets way out in front to sneak a Brandon Eisert pitch just over the left-field fence.
Another way to think about that is that while Raleigh pulls it in the air more than anyone, he’s also just 75th in average distance when he does, around the likes of Dansby Swanson and Francisco Lindor. While we all love a massive home run distance number on a monumental blast, there’s not exactly extra credit for it, either. Among the 40 players with 25+ homers, only five have shorter average home run distances. (Raleigh’s mark is similar home and road, so it’s not that.)
What’s your takeaway here? So far this season, at least, part of Raleigh’s great run has been getting that ball out of that park on that day. It’s hard to say how much of a sustainable skill that is, going forward. It’s hard to argue how well it’s worked so far.
Is he on a hot streak? Or a cold one?
The real risk? Raleigh simply hasn’t been as good in the second half, declining to a .766 OPS after a massive 1.011 mark in the first half. That’s not completely unexpected – it’s really, really hard to keep up a first half like that indefinitely – and it’s not about the myth of a supposed “Home Run Derby curse," either. (Just ask Junior Caminero, who has added 136 points of OPS since his Derby appearance.)
You might consider it late-season fatigue for an everyday catcher, and that’s possibly not wrong; it’s not hard to notice Raleigh is striking out more in the second half (31%, up from 25%).
But the real concern here would be if, when he does make contact, that contact was getting less loud. In that regard: everything is fine. Raleigh’s first-half Statcast expected quality of contact is all but identical to his second-half mark, and after some signs of a slowing bat in August … he’s swinging it as fast as ever right now.
That Raleigh’s second half has slowed somewhat has made the AL MVP race something of a dead heat, since he’s been unable to take advantage of Judge’s elbow injury and separate step back – Judge has out-hit Raleigh by quite a lot over both the last 30 and 14 days. But if there’s any way for him to take back that narrative, nothing will quite do it like touching 60.
Two weeks ago, after Raleigh hit his 49th blast of the season, FanGraphs ran their numbers and came away with “by the [ZiPS] estimate, Raleigh currently has a 32% chance at reaching 60 homers.” He’s added three more since then. The most likely answer? This is going to come down to the final weekend of the season, with the Dodgers in Seattle for what looks like it’s going to be an extremely important series for both sides.
Imagine, then, Raleigh sitting at 58 or 59, with Shohei Ohtani or Clayton Kershaw or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Tyler Glasnow or Blake Snell on the mound. (Or, perhaps more likely for home-run hitting purposes, the softer underbelly of the Dodgers bullpen.) Imagine not only 60 on the line, but the playoffs, too. There’s quite a bit of work to be done over the next few weeks to get there, but it’s within reach. That you can even say that with a straight face on Sept. 9 tells you quite a bit about just what kind of season this has been.