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Dorktown: 2025 Cal Raleigh couldn't stop dumping baseballs into outfield bleachers
🕑 Added 2025-10-27 16:00:21 +0000 UTCSeattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh – who, thanks to a generously proportioned derrière, you might know as the Big Dumper – constantly demolished baseballs in 2025. It was a season renowned for having stood out in all sorts of ways, whether within the history of the Seattle Mariners, among catchers, among switch-hitters, among American Leaguers, or among big leaguers at-large. So let’s celebrate it in everyone’s favorite way: with charts.
Catchers like Raleigh play a highly specialized position and shoulder a grueling defensive burden throughout the 162-game grind of a Major League season. Because of this, they don’t often shoulder a major offensive burden as it’s one of the weaker hitting positions historically. It cannot be overstated enough how relevant his position is in tempering offensive expectations. But someone forgot to tell that to Cal.
As Raleigh matriculated his way through the ‘25 campaign, there are three main inflection points that jump out to me. The first comes after Seattle’s 63rd game on June 7th, in which he homered twice to boost his season total to 26. Going back 24 years, that’s more by that point in a season than any other big leaguer had, let alone a catcher:
Basically no one lately is even all that close either; since 2008, no one aside from ‘22 Aaron Judge hit more than 23 homers thru his team’s 63rd game. Secondly, across the Mariners subsequent 14 games, Raleigh crushed another six bombs, raising his season total to 32:
That total of 32 is good enough for three more than any big leaguer had by the same point throughout this 24-year period. And thirdly, after the M’s played another 17 games, Raleigh launched another six homers, giving him 38 after his team had played 94 games:
That’s four more than anyone else had hit by the same point in 12 years, and three more than anyone else had hit in 24 years. As a catcher! By the time the season wrapped up, he’d dumped sixty (60) baseballs into outfield bleachers. Among fellow switch-hitters, not only was that the most ever, but none since Mickey Mantle’s even topped 45. And among fellow American League infielders, not only is it the most of all time, but it’s also 25% more than anyone else in the last dozen years:
In fact, going back to the 1930s, really A-Rod’s the only other guy who’s even come kinda close. Or in other words, in the last 87+ years, no non-juicing AL infielder has even approached ‘25 Raleigh’s output. Also only one National League infielder has ever hit 60 homers in a season – and since that someone was Mark McGwire, that means no non-juicing Major League infielder has ever hit as many homers in a season as Seattle’s catcher did in 2025. If we isolate that position specifically, not only is ‘25 Raleigh in a tier unto himself, but going back over 20 years, MLB’s only seen one other instance of a catcher hitting as many as 35 homers:
His 60 homers were good for 29 more than any other big league catcher in 2025. To my knowledge, in the last 95 years, there’s only been one other MLB player-season with that many more homers than the runner-up at the same position, which occurred in 2024 when Aaron Judge hit 34 more dingers than any other centerfielder. And I’d argue that sorta requires an asterisk because while he did play centerfield that season, Judge isn’t really a centerfielder. That was the only season when he played it fulltime – solely as a function to accommodate Juan Soto – as opposed to Cal Raleigh fundamentally being a catcher through and through.
Within the pantheon of Seattle luminaries, Raleigh managed to not just shatter his franchise’s all-time record, but he bested any other Mariner except Ken Griffey Jr. by over 36%:
And it’s not just his own franchise that had never seen a player hit so many homers; 86% of the other big league squads have never in their entire history had a player hit so many either:
So it could be boiled down to saying no MLB club outside the Bronx has ever had a non-juicer hit as many homers as that which Seattle’s catcher did in 2025. ‘25 Raleigh also had some fun homer splits, my favorite of which is probably that he managed to crank out 14 homers just in the 1st inning. Which is three more than the entire St. Louis Cardinals, LLC Baseball Corporation:
If we deviate from 2025 for team comparisons, I’m a fan of this juxtaposition:
Then we have the playoffs. ‘25 Raleigh led his Mariners to the AL West title, their first in 24 years. Once there, he led 'em to six playoff wins, the most they’ve ever had in a single postseason, one ill-fated decision to pitch to George Springer away from capturing their first-ever pennant. His five homers tied ‘97 Sandy Alomar Jr. for the most ever hit by a catcher in a postseason, while he generated an OPS of 1.081 across 54 plate appearances, which also stacks up quite well historically:
When you combine that playoff performance with what he did in the regular season, it goes without saying that ‘25 Cal Raleigh produced a season no catcher ever has any business producing. But given just how much surplus value his tremendous offensive production provided on account of his position, it truly was one of the most transcendent, most impactful seasons we’ve ever seen out of any baseball player. Long live the Big Dumper.
Comments
John Buckeye
Agree that Judge isn’t a natural CF, but I think he got by fine defensively. Plus it’s safe to say making sure you could get all those bats in the lineup worked out pretty well for the Yankees that season
Arj
As a Mariners fan, thinking about baseball still hurts right now, but this was a great read nonetheless
the cooler lockon stratos
an absolutely unbelievable performance that took the Mariners further than they'd ever gone before. needed these charts this week. we in Seattle do so love our Dumper <3
