The Seattle Mariners did not need a copy of Cal Raleigh’s MVP-caliber 2025 season to repeat as AL West champions this year, but they are getting something that looks uncomfortably familiar from him in the season’s opening stretch. Raleigh is hitting.143/.236/.245 over his first 55 plate appearances in 2026, with one home run, a 51 wRC+ and a 38.2% strikeout rate.
The numbers land hard because Raleigh has been here before. In 2021, his first big-league season, he hit.180/.223/.309 across 148 plate appearances in 47 games, posted a 46 wRC+ and struck out 35.1% of the time while drawing just seven walks. That early struggle did not define him then, and it has not defined him in Seattle overall, but the opening of 2026 has revived an old question about how long the Mariners can wait for their catcher’s bat to catch up.
The context is what makes the slump more than a bad two weeks. Raleigh was coming off a 2025 season that made him one of the centerpieces of Seattle’s rise back to the top of the division, so the gap between that version and the one at the plate now is wide. Still, the underlying swing data does not point to a wholesale reset. His average bat speed is 74.7 mph, and his swing path tilt has been around 33-35 degrees over the past two years between his left-handed and right-handed swings, compared with about 31 degrees in 2023 and an MLB average of 32 degrees.
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That leaves the Mariners with a more specific concern than a simple cold streak. Raleigh’s mechanics have not shifted enough to suggest a lost swing speed or a broken pre-pitch setup, which pushes the focus toward whether his path is getting too steep and too uppercut for the pitches he is seeing. Seattle can live with early noise. It cannot ignore a version of Raleigh that keeps producing weak contact and strikeouts while the season is still young.
