What USA skipper DeRosa saw from Mariners’ Cal Raleigh at WBC

To say it’s been a disappointing season for Cal Raleigh is an understatement. This time last year, the Seattle Mariners catcher was an All-Star, part of an MVP debate with 38 home runs and getting ready to participate in his first-ever Home Run Derby. This year he’s hitting .168 with nine home runs and has a negative bWAR for the first time since his debut season.

Seattle Mariners coach says WBC led to Cal Raleigh’s injury

No one expected 60 home runs again. But this isn’t even the Raleigh fans have come to know — the Raleigh who led all catchers in home runs in each of the three years preceding his record-breaking 2025. And when a player, even a streaky one, has hit that consistently, you sure scratch your head and wonder what’s happened.

There have been a number of theories: A busy offseason, a labored 2025 where he caught more innings than any other player, an oblique issue that landed him on the injured list for the first time in his career, and a mountain of pressure for a team facing sky-high expectations. But one has been brought up more than once: the World Baseball Classic.

Yes, that was months ago. And it’s hardly an excuse now that’s July. But it sure feels like the start of something, especially when so many people — from M’s bench coach Manny Acta to longtime MLB reporter Tim Kurkjian to broadcasters covering the team — have pointed to it first when trying to pick apart Raleigh’s confounding struggles.

So, when Team USA manager and MLB Network analyst Mark DeRosa joined Seattle Sports Friday, asking him whether he noticed anything “off” with Raleigh during the tournament felt pretty important.

DeRosa keeps it brutally honest

“Yeah,” DeRosa said bluntly during an interview with Curtis Rogers on Bump and Stacy. “Yeah, he was grindin’. He was hooking a lot of balls, front shoulder, rolling over the top hand. Doing some things that you would expect him to be able to get out of quicker than maybe he’s been able to get out of it. So, yes, there were moments throughout that tournament where… listen, he had such a monster season last year and that is such a blast burst of a tournament. Seven, eight games. Like, whoever’s swinging the bat at that moment has to play. I would’ve loved for Cal to be in there for the championship game. But you turn around and you see Will Smith and he’s swinging the bat.”

DeRosa noted Cal wasn’t ignorant to his own struggles.

“You could see Cal wanting to do some extra work when we were getting ready,” he said. “When we were done with practice, he was grabbing the (assistant manager) Brian McCanns of the world and saying, ‘Hey, come here, let’s go into the cage and let’s right the ship.’ But you definitely saw him kind of rolling the ball over a little more than I was accustomed to seeing. But then you dive into the analytics of what made him so successful last year and he’s a guy who gets the ball in the air pull side from both sides of the plate.”

Consider the player profile

Unless a 29-year-old Raleigh has fallen off a cliff, it feels unlikely this kind of performance continues (again, by the end of this season, Raleigh’s name won’t be leading catchers in home runs for the first time since 2021). However, for the Mariners to make any noise in the postseason — or at the very least get to it — they’ll need him to regress to the mean sooner rather than later.

“The game’s brutal,” DeRosa said. “I don’t think Cal’s as good as the 60-homer guy he was last year and he’s certainly not as bad as he’s going this year. It’s kind of somewhere in the middle. But he needs to be kind of that stabilizing presence and let (Randy) Arozarena be the wild horse, let (Julio Rodríguez) be the wild horse. He needs to be that guy for them that they lean on and he’s kind of our franchise pillar while the other guys get to kind of be a little crazy.”

DeRosa on infamous non-handshake moment: ‘Stuff gets overblown’

It wasn’t just the poor performance at the plate for Raleigh. A now infamous non-handshake between Raleigh and teammate, then opponent, Arozarena at the WBC dominated the spring. Arozarena derided the decision after the game in a conversation with reporters. Raleigh went from baseball’s darling to being heavily criticized, and fans and critics alike wondered whether the issue would carry over into the season.

Both Raleigh and Arozarena addressed the issue afterwards, with Arozarena saying (via the team) that they are “brothers and teammates” and Raleigh following up with “Randy knows that I love him.”

First-half offensive frustrations have naturally left the topic to linger, but DeRosa never quite understood why it took off in the first place when another catcher had done the same thing before.

“No one knew it was coming,” DeRosa said. “I think if he could go back and do it again, Cal would’ve given him knucks. I think it was one of those moments where juices were flowin’, we were going to battle, we wanted to win the thing, and I don’t think there was a big deal behind it, I think it was over in two seconds. Three years prior, Will Smith did the same thing. Same exact thing. So, I get it, stuff gets overblown. But I didn’t think anything of it.”

Hear the full conversation at this link or in the audio player in this story. Listen to Bump and Stacy weekdays from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on Seattle Sports 710 AM and the Seattle Sports app. 

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