Cal Raleigh's historically bad Mariners start points to an issue he must solve

There are 162 games in a major league season, so anyone who freaks out about anything after the first 10 does so at their own peril. Yet if it feels like Cal Raleigh is striking out way too often, that's because he is.

Though the 2025 AL MVP runner-up did record a hit and a walk in Sunday's 8-7 loss to the Los Angeles Angels, he also added three more punchouts. That makes it 20 strikeouts in 38 at-bats through the Seattle Mariners' first 10 games.

Believe it or not, that ties the major league record for the most strikeouts by a hitter through his team's first 10 games of a season.

Cal Raleigh's strikeout problem would be baffling if he didn't have such an obvious flaw

As for why Raleigh — who, to be fair, was robbed of his first homer by Jo Adell on Saturday — is striking out so much, his at-bat against Shaun Anderson in the 11th inning on Sunday tells you everything you need to know.

He was at the plate with two outs and the bases loaded in a 7-7 game, and Anderson hypothetically did him a solid by throwing him three four-seam fastballs. Raleigh feasted on four-seamers last year, notably for 24 of his 60 home runs.

But in this case, Raleigh took one four-seamer for a ball and swung and missed at the other two, including for a third strike that ended the at-bat and the inning.

So it goes for Raleigh in 2026. He had swung and missed at 20 four-seam fastballs even before Sunday's action, which was four more than any other hitter. Worse still, 14 of those whiffs were against four-seamers in the strike zone.

If it's explanations you want, probably the most obvious one is that Raleigh's average bat speed is down from 75.2 mph in 2025 to 74.7 mph this year. That might have had something to do with cold weather in Seattle, but that wasn't the case in Anaheim. The temperature at first pitch on Sunday was 83 degrees.

As such, the other easy target is the World Baseball Classic. It cost Raleigh most of spring training, and he didn't even get to play at the end of it after Mark DeRosa benched him in favor of Will Smith. Raleigh thus missed out on competitive at-bats, not to mention any extra cage work that he might have gotten in a normal spring training.

Whatever the case, pitchers have clearly caught on. They're throwing Raleigh four-seamers a career high 39.2 percent of the time, and with a different location pattern than before. The one from Anderson was out over the plate, but he's mostly been getting pounded inside — at least when batting lefty against right-handed hurlers.

Clearly, pitchers are daring him to speed his bat up. He just hasn't been able to, and it's an increasingly hard-to-ignore problem amid a 4-6 start for the defending AL West champions.