Luke Raley opened Wednesday with a.296 batting average, a.356 on-base percentage, a.556 slugging percentage and a.911 OPS, a sharp start that has him one home run shy of his total from 73 games last season. The 31-year-old also had three homers in 16 games, a pace that looks nothing like the injury-hampered 2025 he endured.
The rebound matters because it comes when the Mariners’ offense has been off to a slow start, and Raley was a big piece of their better version last year. He hit 22 home runs and posted a.783 OPS in 2024, production that made his early return to form more than a nice streak for a team looking for life at the plate.
Seattle Sports insider Shannon Drayer said Tuesday on Bump and Stacy during The Dugout that Raley appeared to recognize he may have been putting too much into the weight room and needed more flexibility. She said he changed his offseason routine by turning to yoga before weights, starting with stretching and body care before moving on to lifting.
Drayer said that shift fits a player who, at 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, has already reached the stage where the body asks for something different. She added that Raley became a first-time dad last year, another change that can force an athlete to look at his routine through a new lens. The move was not framed as a reinvention so much as an adjustment from a player still trying to get the most out of himself.
That harder edge is part of what has long defined him. Drayer said Raley is one of the Mariners’ energy guys and that few players in baseball attack the game the way he does. She also said he is the type who has the toughest time putting a bad game behind him, which helps explain why the offseason reset sounded as much mental as physical.
Raley’s start gives Seattle a reason to keep watching whether the changes hold. If the flexibility work and the push to have more fun out there stick, the Mariners may have found a version of him that can look more like 2024 than the injured player they had to manage last season.