Sam Miller, one of baseball’s sharpest analysts, posted a observation on Bluesky this week that lands like a punchline and stays like a diagnosis: “Whatever day this year that you remember thinking ‘man, what happened to Cal Raleigh, he’s been terrible’ — since that day, he’s been worse.”
He’s not wrong. The numbers are staggering.
One year ago, Cal Raleigh was the most valuable catcher in baseball. He hit .247 with 60 home runs and 125 RBIs, posted a .948 OPS, won a Silver Slugger, made the All-Star team, and finished second in American League MVP voting with 7.2 WAR. He was the engine of a Mariners team that leaned on his power and his framing behind the plate all summer.
Through 68 games in 2026, Raleigh is batting .163 with a .267 on-base percentage and a .298 slugging percentage. Nine home runs. Twenty-nine RBIs. A .565 OPS — nearly 400 points lower than last season. His WAR sits at -0.3, meaning he has been worse than a freely available replacement-level player. The guy who was the second-best player in the American League is now actively subtracting value from his own roster.
The plate discipline numbers tell a story of a hitter who has lost the ability to do damage. Raleigh’s strikeout rate has climbed from 31.5% last season to 36.9% in 2026 — 93 whiffs in 252 at-bats. His walk rate (12.3%) is roughly in line with his 2025 mark (13.8%), so he hasn’t stopped recognizing balls and strikes. He’s just stopped hitting the strikes. His isolated power, .342 a year ago — elite, Aaron Judge territory — has cratered to .135. He is swinging through pitches he used to send 430 feet.
His last five games, all against the Giants and Rays between July 11 and 19, paint the picture in miniature: 2-for-16, no extra-base hits, no RBIs, five strikeouts. Baseball Reference’s win-probability-added metric for the season sits at -1.9, and his RE24 — the linear-weights measure of how much a hitter’s results change run expectancy — is -13.26. Last year it was +50.82. That is not a slump. That is a 64-run swing in contextual run production from one season to the next.
Raleigh is 29, which is not an age that typically triggers this kind of cliff. Catchers wear down, yes, and Raleigh has caught a lot of innings — 917 behind the plate in 2022 alone, plus the grinding workload of a contender. But a collapse from 7.2 WAR to below replacement in one offseason is not normal aging. It is the kind of decline that prompts questions about injury, mechanical breakdown, or something the Mariners’ coaching staff has not yet identified.
Seattle has kept him in the lineup, splitting his time between catcher and designated hitter, batting him fourth through sixth. The Mariners are still winning games — they took two of three from the Giants in mid-July — but they are doing it without the bat that carried them in 2025.
Miller’s post circulated widely among baseball fans this week, and the reason it resonated is that it captures something the splits confirm: there is no rock bottom yet. Every time you check back in, the numbers have drifted further south. The 60-home-run catcher is gone. What’s left is a .163 hitter with negative WAR, and nobody — not the Mariners, not Raleigh, not anyone watching — has an explanation.
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