There’s one way Mariners’ Cal Raleigh sets himself apart as a hitter

Dec 24, 2024, 11:41 AM | Updated: 4:58 pm

Editor, Seattle Sports

The Seattle Mariners recently put out a video of their five hardest hits from the 2024 season, so naturally I watched it, because who doesn’t like seeing hitters perfectly square up a baseball?

Has the AL West changed on the Mariners this offseason?

I had two observations as I took in the hits.

The first is pretty obvious: the whole list featured the same two players – Luke Raley and Cal Raleigh. The lack of an appearance by Julio Rodríguez was perhaps a bit surprising, but I think this says more about how strong Raley and Raleigh are than anything about Rodríguez. And if you happen to recall when Raley put one in the upper deck in right field at T-Mobile Park against the Phillies, you know what to expect at No. 1 on the list.

The second observation has to do with Raleigh in particular. He had two inclusions, ranking at No. 2 and No. 3 on the list. And oddly enough, they came from the same game – a two-homer night on July 11 in Anaheim, Calif., against the Angels. Clearly Seattle’s switch-hitting catcher was feeling pretty good that day.

My observation isn’t so much that the hits came on the same day, however. In fact, I just alluded to what it was. Raleigh’s two hardest hits from last season were split evenly on each side of the plate. On that night, Raleigh lasered a 113.9 mph home run down the line in right field as a left-handed hitter. And later in the game, he turned around to the right side and walloped a near carbon copy into the corner in left field with an exit velocity of 113.8 mph.

That got me to thinking: How many other switch-hitters regularly hit the ball as hard from both sides as Raleigh does? The answer: He’s in a class by himself.

I dug into some Statcast leaderboards for the 2024 season and found that Raleigh ranked 18th in all of baseball in amount of “barrels” (definition here) per plate appearance. Among the players ranked above Raleigh, only two are fellow switch-hitters: New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor (No. 14), and Gig Harbor High School product and Colorado Rockies first baseman Michael Toglia (No. 15). But when you look at Lindor and Toglia’s hardest hits of 2024, neither had even one hit with an exit velocity of at least 113 mph, let alone one each hitting righty and lefty.

Now if you go down the board of the hardest batted-bat events by each player, you will only find five switch-hitters with harder hits than Raleigh’s best. And among those, only one player had a harder hit than Raleigh from both sides: Reds phenom Elly de la Cruz, who was the lone switch-hitter to top a 114 mph exit velocity from each side of the plate. But the Cincinnati shortstop had a barrels per plate appearance rate of 7.3%, which ranks him 39 spots below Raleigh on that leaderboard.

In general, the switch-hitters who had at least one hit with a higher exit velocity than Raleigh either are much better from one side of the plate (like Arizona’s Ketel Marte, an ex-Mariner who crushes lefty pitchers), or had one swing that was an outlier (such as Cleveland’s José Ramírez, who had one hit with a 116.6 mph exit velocity but no more that reached even 110 mph).

Raleigh, who turned 28 last month, has always been a powerful hitter, but it wasn’t until this year that he evened it out on each side of the plate. He hit a career-high 34 homers in 2024, and a big reason for that is he blasted 13 from the right side in addition to 21 from the left. Compare that to 2023, when Raleigh had just four homers as a righty and 26 as a lefty. For his career, Raleigh has 20 homers from the right side to 73 from the left, so he entered this year with just seven as a righty.

Point being, this Cal Raleigh guy that the Mariners have is pretty incredible, as he showed in 2024 that he can be the hardest-hitting switch-hitter in the game. When you add that to the fact that not only did he win his first Gold Glove this year but he also took Platinum Glove honors as the American League’s best overall defensive player, you start to realize just how special of a player he is.

Maybe next year MLB will even get around to naming him an All-Star. Yeah, I don’t know how that hasn’t happened yet either.