Cal Raleigh's baffling slump reaches crisis point despite Mariners lineup shuffle

The Seattle Mariners' 2-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Sunday was technically on the bullpen. But it's hard to win any game in which your offense musters one run, and this one has the indignity of being a game in which the Mariners went out of their way to get Cal Raleigh going.

Even if he didn't follow our exact blueprint for a better lineup, Dan Wilson finally shook things up by moving Julio Rodríguez and Josh Naylor up a spot while simultaneously dropping Raleigh from the No. 2 hole down to the cleanup spot. If nothing else, it got their most volatile hitter out of the spot where any given club's best hitter is supposed to go.

It was no use. Though he did manage to draw a walk, Raleigh went 0-for-3 with two more strikeouts to make a bad stretch even worse. Over his last eight games, the runner-up for the 2025 AL MVP is now 0-for-32 with 15 strikeouts.

Cal Raleigh has gone from carrying the Mariners to holding them back, and it's inexplicable

So, you want to know just how bad Raleigh is right now. Well, it's not just bad. It's an italicized, capital-B Bad kind of bad.

Through his first 38 games of 2026, he has just a .161 batting average to go with seven home runs. He hit .177 in his worst 38-game stretch of 2025, and even then he clubbed 13 of his 60 home runs. He also struck out "just" 44 times, which only sounds good because he's fanned 53 times this year.

After last weekend's scare with soreness in his side, one bright side is that the 29-year-old Raleigh seems to be healthy. And there are others, such as how his bat speed is in the 81st percentile. Heck, he even has a 78th-percentile barrel rate.

It is nonetheless hard to overstate how painful it is to watch Raleigh hit right now.

The swing decisions aren't terrible, but only eight hitters have experienced a bigger jump in their whiff rates within the strike zone relative to last season. Raleigh also entered Sunday batting just .100 against four-seam fastballs, and pitchers have clearly noticed:

• April: 34.7 percent four-seamers
• May: 49.1 percent four-seamers

Pitchers obviously see something exploitable, whether or not they know the exact reason it exists. That investigation is for Raleigh and the Mariners, and the case seems to have gone cold.

Given how much he's had on his plate over the last year, you do wonder if fatigue is an issue. There was also buzz about Raleigh feeling off with his swing during the World Baseball Classic, so it's possible that he just hasn't had the runway he needs to get in sync.

Whatever the explanation, the Mariners are supposed to be succeeding in large part because of Raleigh. As they're now 19-22 after dropping this weekend's series to the White Sox, they can't even say they're succeeding in spite of him.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow