Grading torrid Cal Raleigh and the Seattle Mariners' 2-1 series win vs. Chicago Cubs

The only thing hotter than the weather on the North Side of Chicago this weekend was Cal Raleigh's bat. The Seattle Mariners soon-to-be All-Star catcher went yard not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times to pace a series win over one of the best offensive teams in baseball.

What is there even left to say about the season Raleigh is having? It's not even July yet, and "Big Dumper" is already up to 31 home runs. With three more, he'll set a new personal best. With 17 more, he'll tie the single-season record for a catcher.

Though Raleigh certainly drove the action, the entire Mariners offense made Wrigley Field look like a Little League park. It put up 30 runs in three games against the Chicago Cubs, who came into the series with the second-best record and second-best offense in all of MLB.

Not a bad effort, in other words. Let's get further into it by grading the Mariners' performance in all facets of the game.

Mariners vs. Cubs Breakdown and Grades: Series Results

• Friday, June 20: SEA 9, CHC 4
• Saturday, June 21: SEA 7, CHC 10
• Sunday, June 22: SEA 14, CHC 6

Grading the Mariners’ Offense: A

Just as a reminder, the Mariners had been in a bad offensive funk in which they had averaged only 3.6 runs per game amid an 18-24 stretch. And this was despite ample help from Raleigh, who went deep 15 times in this span but just didn't get much support from his fellow batsmen.

To this end, the Mariners broke from the mold in a resounding way over the weekend.

Raleigh continued to do his thing with homers in all three games, including two in the opener on Friday. He is only the seventh player to hit as many as 31 home runs in his team's first 76 games. And while it feels like jinxing him to say it, it can't not be said that he's on pace for an American League-record 65 homers.

What was different in this series was just how many other hitters got in on the fun, and unusual suspects to boot. Mitch Garver, Donovan Solano, and Dominic Canzone all had two-homer games, with each bringing the player's respective total for the season to three.

Though Garver still has a long way to go in redeeming his season, Friday's outburst was a sign that he may yet regress to the mean. Whereas the Mariners probably got all they were going to get out of Rowdy Tellez, the huge gap between Garver's 2025 OPS (.640) and career OPS (.775) may be a little too big to last.

As for Solano, he is now 18-for-40 with 12 RBI in his last 36 games. This is another apparent case of regressing to the mean, as even a guy his age (37) was unlikely to carry a .300-something OPS for the entire season. To wit, he posted exactly a .760 OPS in 2023 and 2024.

As to less welcome developments, Julio Rodríguez has now gone 23 games without hitting a ball over the fence. Even if he's hit a solid .271 in the interim, he needs to hit for power since he's too aggressive to consistently draw walks. As this is typically the time of year when he starts heating up, the Mariners have every right to be getting a little impatient.

Otherwise, Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena each had a blunder on the basepaths on Saturday, potentially costing the Mariners a couple of runs in what ended up being a tight contest. Yet even with this said, it's hard to look at 30 runs in three games and conclude that it was a bad offensive series for the M's.

On the contrary, this felt an awful lot like the good ol' times of...[checks notes]...earlier this season.

Grading the Mariners’ Defense: B

The B here is meant to imply, "Well, the defense didn't do anything wrong, but it also didn't get many chances to do right either."

The Cubs got 16 of their 20 runs on home runs, including all but one of the 10 runs they scored in their win on Saturday. With the weather hot and the wind blowing out to center field, the North Siders indeed took full advantage of launching-pad conditions at Wrigley Field.

The defense did what it could, however. It notably didn't allow any stolen bases in the first two games before a 1-for-2 effort with Garver behind the dish on Sunday, thus responding to what had been a major matchup concern coming into the series. And with no errors committed in the three games, the Mariners have now allowed just two runners to reach on errors in their last 22 games.

On the infield, the M's got a couple of nifty plays by Solano at the cold corner, plus a really nice pick on a hot smash by Ben Williamson at the cold corner. And before he made his presence felt with his bat (3-for-4 with 2 RBI) on Saturday, Raley first made an impact with his glove on diving catch in right field on Friday:

Such strong defensive efforts could be the norm for the M's going forward, if for no other reason than Solano and Raley will see time in the field that otherwise would have gone to Tellez. With -5 Outs Above Average to his name, he had been among the league's worst defensive first basemen.

Grading the Mariners’ Pitching: D

Of the 20 runs the Mariners gave up this weekend, only three weren't scored off that day's starter.

George Kirby, Emerson Hancock, and Logan Gilbert deserve this much grace: it was hot out there. It was 82 degrees at first pitch on Friday and a scorching 94 on Saturday, and the temperature was once again in the neighborhood of 90 on Sunday. The heat was downright hazardous on Saturday, with umpire Chad Whitson and right-hander Trent Thornton both having to leave the game with heat-related issues.

This said, it wasn't all thanks to the aforementioned perfect launching-pad conditions that Kirby, Hancock, and Gilbert registered nine of the 11 home runs that Cubs hitters sent over the fence. The three left too many hittable pitches in the strike zone, including the middle-middle sinker that Happ took for a ride against Kirby on Friday:

Kirby and Gilbert at least gutted out five solid innings, whereas Hancock was torched for a career-high nine runs over four innings. He just didn't have it, though you have to hand it to him for not using the heat as an excuse.

“I mean, yeah, it was hot,” Hancock said after the game, per Bob Condotta of The Seattle Times. “But at the end of the day you’ve got to go out there and do a job and I wasn’t able to do it. Dug us in a hole way too early on, and that’s on me. Just made a bunch of mistakes, they took advantage of it.”

To its credit, the bullpen picked up eight innings and allowed only one run in the first two games of the series and was solid once again (4 IP, 2 ER) in relief of Gilbert on Sunday. Thornton pretty much put his life on the line in Game 2, as he threw 51 pitches over 2.1 scoreless innings before he succumbed to the heat.

It's been a good month of June for the pen, which has posted easily its lowest ERA of any month at 3.28. And this is with Andrés Muñoz making only four appearances all month, as Dan Wilson has committed to the bit of keeping his closer in reserve unless a save is on the line.

Grading the Mariners’ Strategy: B

If we're going to second-guess Wilson over one thing in this series, it's whether he should have stuck with Hancock for as long as he did on Saturday.

The nine runs he gave up didn't come all at the end of his outing. Six of them came in the first two innings, at which time the Mariners already faced a six-run deficit. Had Wilson decided he'd seen enough right then and there, the seven runs the offense ended up scoring hypothetically would have been enough to win the game. And besides, an early hook would have had the benefit of getting Hancock out of the heat.

Then again, Wilson needed length on Saturday after Kirby went only five innings on Friday. And for what it's worth, the 2-2 changeup that Michael Busch hit for a game-breaking three-run homer in the third wasn't that bad of a pitch.

Otherwise, the only other thing to take issue with is Wilson's continued insistence on using Dylan Moore as a starter against lefties. That is Wilson deferring to Moore's track record and basically denying the reality that his season has gone off the rails. He has all of one hit since May 28, a span of nearly a month.

If it was us, we'd rather see Raley and Cole Young start over Moore against lefties. The former has been swinging a hot bat since he began his injury rehab on June 12, while the latter has been teasing a breakout of late.

Whatever the case, it's nice to be coming away from a series feeling like Wilson suddenly has a plethora of offensive weapons at his disposal. This is the opposite of what the status quo had been going into the weekend, which is a nice change of pace even if it doesn't last — and we're reluctant to guess it will.

Up next is a trip to Minnesota for a four-game series against the Twins. With just three more wins, the Mariners can clinch at least a split on their current 10-game road trip.