The Cal Who Solely Hit Homers

We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigh lots currently, as we should always. He’s presently on tempo for 9.9 WAR, which might represent the best season of all time for a catcher. Though his protection has taken a step again from its earlier heights, Raleigh is operating an absurd 182 wRC+ and main baseball with 26 dwelling runs. He’ll have to return right down to Earth sooner or later, however he’s all however sure to guide all catchers in dwelling runs for the third straight season. He’s almost doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has an actual shot to interrupt Salvador Perez’s file of 48 dwelling runs by a catcher – if he retains up his present tempo, he’ll break it by 16 homers!

On Might 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how properly Raleigh’s new, extra selective strategy was figuring out. Though Raleigh was taking extra pitches over the guts of the plate in hitter’s counts (a development that has continued within the ensuing weeks), the endurance has allowed him to get forward extra typically and do harm. “Does all of this imply that Raleigh goes to take care of his 170 wRC+?” Ben requested. “No approach.” That was the one reply he may have given. To counsel in any other case would have been sabermetric malpractice. However, uh, Raleigh didn’t precisely regress again to the imply from there on out. From Might 20 to June 8, Raleigh was one of the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His common exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit higher than Aaron Decide.

It nonetheless appears secure to imagine that Raleigh received’t preserve his wRC+ above 180 or put up the primary 10-win catcher season in historical past. First, that’s a ridiculously excessive stage to take care of. Raleigh has only one hit prior to now two video games, and people two video games dropped his wRC+ by 9 factors. He’ll additionally in all probability get drained sooner or later. The Mariners have made a devoted effort to ease his catching load after he led the majors in innings caught in 2024, completed second in 2023, and fifth in 2022. This season, 13 of his 64 begins have come at DH, besides, he’s sat out only one recreation. He leads all catchers with 284 plate appearances, and ranks fourth in innings caught. So whereas this does signify a lighter load, he’s nonetheless not precisely getting a lot relaxation.

For proper now, although, Raleigh is in rarefied air. Final week, whereas writing about Josh Bell’s BABIP woes, I discovered myself wanting up each certified season in AL/NL historical past and dividing dwelling runs by complete hits. Bell ranks 350th on the checklist, which places him within the 97th percentile. He actually is having a bizarre season. He simply can’t purchase a success until it’s a house run. However the prime of the checklist was what actually stunned me. Listed here are the all-time leaders.

Greater than 40% of Raleigh’s hits have been homers, which places him in sixth place. To be clear, that’s sixth place out of 13,784 certified participant seasons, and he’s sandwiched behind a few of the greatest and most excessive dwelling run hitters of all time. The 60-homer barrier has been crossed eight instances in baseball historical past, and 4 of these eight seasons present up within the prime 11. And there’s Raleigh proper within the center.

Quickly after I observed this, Mark Simon of Sports activities Data Options wrote a cool article about defensive positioning. As he defined, “The out possibilities we use in establishing a participant’s Defensive Runs Saved embrace a price particular to positioning.” Utilizing these possibilities, Mark calculated which gamers had been harm essentially the most by glorious defensive positioning, and Raleigh was second on the checklist, or possibly tied with Marcus Semien, as each gamers had been at 2.5.

Raleigh presents a comparatively straightforward task for whoever is accountable for printing up these little defensive positioning playing cards. He leads the league with a 56.9% pull price. Extra particularly, 37.1% of his batted balls are fly balls or line drives within the air. That’s proper, he’s almost 5 proportion factors above Isaac Paredes, the patron saint of pulling the ball within the air. That quantity is the second highest in your entire pitch monitoring period, behind solely Adam Duvall’s 38.1% in 2023. Nobody in baseball is pulling the ball within the air as predictably as Raleigh, and it’s at the very least attainable that Duvall is the one participant who has ever carried out so. So this predictability has helped Raleigh launch tons of homers and extra-base hits, nevertheless it has additionally value him a few hits. And that explains that, I assumed.

However right here’s the factor: Raleigh’s .270 BABIP is 20 factors beneath the league common, nevertheless it’s neither unbelievably nor unsustainably low. In reality, till these previous two video games, he was operating the very best BABIP of his complete profession. That’s the advantage of hitting the baseball actually arduous. It doesn’t give even well-positioned defenders a lot of an opportunity. Raleigh’s common exit velocity on dwelling runs is 105.5 mph. That ranks 52nd amongst all gamers with at the very least 150 batted balls. On non-homers, his common exit velo is 90.5 mph, which ranks forty fifth. So whereas he’s a traditional energy man with numerous whiffs and plenty of strikeouts, he’s not significantly all-or-nothing both. He hits the ball arduous even when he’s not sending it out of the ballpark.

All of that is to say that Raleigh wasn’t atop the checklist as a result of he was solely homering and never getting common base hits. I pulled the season stats going again to 1901. Raleigh additionally ranks sixth all time in dwelling runs per plate look (9.2%) and residential runs per ball in play (15.6%). He ranks eleventh in dwelling runs per at-bat (10.7%). By any measure, he’s homering at one of many highest charges in baseball historical past. I don’t know how lengthy this can proceed – seeing what occurred after Ben’s article, I don’t need to low cost the likelihood that Raleigh will proceed operating a 180 wRC+ till the warmth dying of the universe – however we should always in all probability take pleasure in it whereas we will. Raleigh is really doing one thing particular this season.