The Cal Who Only Hit Homers

We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigh a lot lately, as we should. He’s currently on pace for 9.9 WAR, which would constitute the greatest season of all time for a catcher. Although his defense has taken a step back from its previous heights, Raleigh is running an absurd 182 wRC+ and leading baseball with 26 home runs. He’ll have to come down to Earth at some point, but he’s all but certain to lead all catchers in home runs for the third straight season. He’s nearly doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has a real shot to break Salvador Perez’s record of 48 home runs by a catcher – if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll break it by 16 homers!

On May 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how well Raleigh’s new, more selective approach was working out. Even though Raleigh was taking more pitches over the heart of the plate in hitter’s counts (a trend that has continued in the ensuing weeks), the patience has allowed him to get ahead more often and do damage. “Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+?” Ben asked. “No way.” That was the only answer he could have given. To suggest otherwise would have been sabermetric malpractice. But, uh, Raleigh didn’t exactly regress back to the mean from there on out. From May 20 to June 8, Raleigh was the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit better than Aaron Judge.

It still seems safe to assume that Raleigh won’t keep his wRC+ above 180 or put up the first 10-win catcher season in history. First, that’s a ridiculously high level to maintain. Raleigh has just one hit in the past two games, and those two games dropped his wRC+ by nine points. He’ll also probably get tired at some point. The Mariners have made a dedicated effort to ease his catching load after he led the majors in innings caught in 2024, finished second in 2023, and fifth in 2022. This season, 13 of his 64 starts have come at DH, but even so, he’s sat out just one game. He leads all catchers with 284 plate appearances, and ranks fourth in innings caught. So while this does represent a lighter load, he’s still not exactly getting much rest.

For right now, though, Raleigh is in rarefied air. Last week, while writing about Josh Bell’s BABIP woes, I found myself looking up every qualified season in AL/NL history and dividing home runs by total hits. Bell ranks 350th on the list, which puts him in the 97th percentile. He really is having a weird season. He just can’t buy a hit unless it’s a home run. But the top of the list was what really surprised me. Here are the all-time leaders.

More than 40% of Raleigh’s hits have been homers, which puts him in sixth place. To be clear, that’s sixth place out of 13,784 qualified player seasons, and he’s sandwiched behind some of the best and most extreme home run hitters of all time. The 60-homer barrier has been crossed eight times in baseball history, and four of those eight seasons show up in the top 11. And there’s Raleigh right in the middle.

Soon after I noticed this, Mark Simon of Sports Info Solutions wrote a cool article about defensive positioning. As he explained, “The out probabilities we use in establishing a player’s Defensive Runs Saved include a value specific to positioning.” Using those probabilities, Mark calculated which players had been hurt the most by excellent defensive positioning, and Raleigh was second on the list, or maybe tied with Marcus Semien, as both players were at 2.5.

Raleigh presents a relatively easy assignment for whoever is in charge of printing up those little defensive positioning cards. He leads the league with a 56.9% pull rate. More specifically, 37.1% of his batted balls are fly balls or line drives in the air. That’s right, he’s nearly five percentage points above Isaac Paredes, the patron saint of pulling the ball in the air. That number is the second highest in the entire pitch tracking era, behind only Adam Duvall’s 38.1% in 2023. No one in baseball is pulling the ball in the air as predictably as Raleigh, and it’s at least possible that Duvall is the only player who has ever done so. So this predictability has helped Raleigh launch tons of homers and extra-base hits, but it has also cost him a couple of hits. And that explains that, I thought.

But here’s the thing: Raleigh’s .270 BABIP is 20 points below the league average, but it’s neither unbelievably nor unsustainably low. In fact, until these past two games, he was running the highest BABIP of his entire career. That’s the benefit of hitting the baseball really hard. It doesn’t give even well-positioned defenders much of a chance. Raleigh’s average exit velocity on home runs is 105.5 mph. That ranks 52nd among all players with at least 150 batted balls. On non-homers, his average exit velo is 90.5 mph, which ranks 45th. So while he is a classic power guy with lots of whiffs and lots of strikeouts, he’s not particularly all-or-nothing either. He hits the ball hard even when he’s not sending it out of the ballpark.

All of this is to say that Raleigh wasn’t atop the list because he was only homering and not getting regular base hits. I pulled the season stats going back to 1901. Raleigh also ranks sixth all time in home runs per plate appearance (9.2%) and home runs per ball in play (15.6%). He ranks 11th in home runs per at-bat (10.7%). By any measure, he is homering at one of the highest rates in baseball history. I have no idea how long this will continue – seeing what happened after Ben’s article, I don’t want to discount the possibility that Raleigh will continue running a 180 wRC+ until the heat death of the universe – but we should probably enjoy it while we can. Raleigh is truly doing something special this season.