Tuesday Afternoon News Dump: Mariners Extend Raleigh

It’s not every day that a piece of baseball news makes just about everyone go, “Oh, yay, that’s nice!” but the Mariners pulled it off less than 72 hours before the start of their season. Cal Raleigh is sticking around for the long run.

Raleigh’s new contract runs from, well, now, through the end of the 2030 season, and will pay him $105 million over those six years, plus a $20 million vesting option for 2031. The extension buys out Raleigh’s previous $5.6 million arbitration settlement, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who was first to report it.

The 28-year-old Raleigh is already a cult hero in Seattle, and it’s not hard to figure out why. He’s one of the top defensive catchers in baseball, and he’s averaged 4.6 WAR per season since 2022. All active catchers put together have combined for six 30-homer seasons between them. Raleigh, a switch-hitter, has two of those, plus a 27-dinger campaign, in his three full years in the majors.

Is Raleigh the best catcher in baseball? That’s a tough question. I don’t know if I have a strong opinion on the matter. What I will say is this: Since his debut in July 2021, Raleigh is tied for the major league lead in WAR among catchers. He also homered in Game 1 of the Mariners’ 2022 Wild Card Series win against Toronto, then scored the winning run the next day as Seattle turned an 8-1 deficit into a 10-9 win in the span of four innings. That means he’s made a significant contribution to every Mariners playoff win since 2001.

And, you know, it was Raleigh’s walk-off home run against the Athletics that clinched that drought-breaking playoff berth in the first place.

All of which explains part of the cult hero thing, but not all of it. Because his nickname, one of the most distinctive and widely (so to speak) utilized in baseball, is Big Dumper. In my experience, the greatest adulation a man can experience is to be known by (and loved for) his butt.

America’s most voluptuous backstop will now become one of its best-remunerated. Which sounds a little off at first. I just talked this guy up as one of the best two-way players in the league, and he’s getting paid less than $18 million a year? Even factoring in that he’s three years from free agency, that’s light. That’s no. 4 starter money in this market.

But while baseball’s financial explosion has enriched owners, TV executives, general contractors, real estate speculators, and stars at every other position, catchers have largely been passed by. Believe it or not, this is just the fifth $100 million contract ever given to a catcher.

This is not a new problem for catchers. When Realmuto played out his team control years and hit free agency in 2020, he wanted to set a new standard for catcher pay. Sure enough, he got a record-setting AAV from the Phillies, but his coattails have been short.

You don’t need me to tell you that catcher is a unique position. Catchers, more than any other players on the diamond, impact the game in ways that don’t show up in the box score. And that will remain true if and when MLB introduces a limited ABS challenge system. Defense is so important that in some cases, offense is optional. The physical demands of the position are extraordinary, to the point where catchers need more time off than other position players. These factors not only shorten catchers’ time behind the plate, they make it so the position attracts players who can’t put on some weight and slide down the defensive spectrum in their mid-30s like aging third basemen or center fielders do.

So catchers, in general, don’t get 15-year contracts. Or even 10-year contracts. Smith did, but he had to accept a salary of just $14 million a year, despite averaging more than four wins a season in the three years leading up to his extension. Mauer and Posey got close, but they were all-time greats, and Mauer’s contract at least ended up being a cautionary tale as concussions moved him off the position.

Because catchers tend to get treated like running backs, we get to see what the going rate is for players at various performance levels without too much lag. There are 10 starting catchers in the league who are on contracts with multiple guaranteed years. (“Starting catcher” is a little fuzzy in some cases; I included Christian Vázquez but left off Carson Kelly, for instance. I also didn’t include Mitch Garver and Willson Contreras, who are basically done catching.) Here they are, along with the player’s major league experience when the extension kicked in.

You want to know how up-to-date the catcher market is? Three of those contracts — Raleigh’s, Kirk’s, and Trevino’s — were signed within the past week. The other thing that sticks out: Only three of these 10 contracts were signed in free agency. That’s Realmuto, Vázquez, and d’Arnaud.

From a purely cynical viewpoint — that is to say, one ignorant of framing, physicality, and postseason heroics — one might wonder if the Mariners are wise to lock up a Rubenesque player at a taxing position through his age-33 season, when he has a career batting average of .218 and a career OBP of .296.

My response to that is: OK, who are you going to get to catch, then? Because over the past five years, the free agent market for catchers has been Realmuto, d’Arnaud, and a bunch of guys who only own bats out of professional courtesy. Anyone who’s worth a damn gets extended. With William Contreras and Adley Rutschman coming into their primes for teams that typically avoid spending anything significant on free agents, perhaps that will change. But for the time being at least, you can’t find a good catcher in free agency.

Which no doubt factored into Seattle’s decision to buck its own trend of tightfistedness and lock up Big Dumper.

That’s not to say that this contract isn’t without risk. Our Jon Becker estimated that buying out Raleigh’s first three free agent years will end up costing Seattle about $72 million. And because Raleigh is a college guy who played his first full season in the majors at 25, those three years will be his age-31 through age-33 seasons. (Speaking of Raleigh’s college career, because I can’t help myself: There are two great framing catchers who came from ACC schools, and the one named Raleigh played at Florida State, while the other, Patrick Bailey, played at NC State. Drives me nuts. It’s a slap in the face for nominative determinism.)

Is it possible that five years from now the Mariners will have an old, slow guy with bad knees and hips and a contract they can’t trade. Sure. But that’s a problem for another day.

For now, they’ve got Cal Raleigh, one of the best catchers in the league. More than that, they’ve made a commitment to a core player and fan favorite at a time when those same fans’ opinions of management and ownership is volatile at best. Locking up Raleigh is not the penny-pinching, arbitrage-obsessed, 54%-er nonsense Mariners fans have come to expect.

It’s something a winning team would do.