Salk: How Mariners can replace Cal Raleigh’s production

Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh goes to the 10-day injured list Thursday with a right oblique strain and leaves a giant hole in this lineup.

Why Cal Raleigh going on IL is good for him and Mariners

For how long? Well, we don’t know that yet. It’s going to be at least 10 days. Could it be longer? Absolutely.

What do they need to do in order to survive time without Cal Raleigh? Well, I’m looking forward to seeing a little Jhonny Pereda. Sure, he’s going to be a defensive catcher and he should be okay. He actually gave the Mariners a couple of decent at-bats and a few hits in his first call up.

But at the end of the day, to replace Cal’s production, what he means to this lineup, there’s really only two guys who are fully capable of doing it. And that list obviously starts with Julio Rodríguez.

Now, that doesn’t mean you want Julio under the impression that he has to be both Julio and Cal moving forward. There’s nothing worse for Julio than asking him to try to do too much. But you know what they could really use? One of those epic Julio runs. And Julio’s had a good start to the year. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism. But that run that Julio tends to go on where he starts clubbing home runs, and stealing bags, and you can’t keep him off base and he’s just an absolute terror for the opponents. Yeah, now would be a really good time to see that from Julio.

Obviously the other name is Josh Naylor, and we’ve seen little bits and pieces of what that version of Naylor looks like. Again, he’s a veteran guy. I don’t expect Josh Naylor to try to outdo himself, to do too much, to try to make up the difference for Cal. But a little bit of extra power from Naylor sure wouldn’t hurt.

They’ve been getting it from Luke Raley. They’ve been getting it from Dom Canzone. They’ve been getting it from Cole Young. I’m not looking for any of those guys to do more. But if you could get just that little extra from your other superstar in Julio Rodríguez and Josh Naylor, the guy you spent money on this offseason, well, I don’t know if anything would go farther to help them get through this period without Cal than that.

This article is a transcription from the video at the top of the post. It had been edited for its clarity. 

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