Paul Skenes gifts Mariners empty Cal Raleigh validation with WBC lament

How did the Seattle Mariners' 2026 season fall apart? The first domino may have fallen during the World Baseball Classic in March, specifically to extent that it's when the seed of Cal Raleigh's doomed year was planted.

So too, it seems, was the seed for Paul Skenes' own doomed year. Though he didn't outright blame the WBC for causing his struggles for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Skenes did tell Colin Beazley of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that participating in the event was "kind of the root of it a little bit."

"Usually, that time of year, you're kind of ramping up and it's a little bit slow," said the 2025 NL Cy Young Award winner. "You can kind of get onto the slope and find your body. One live [batting practice], you're topping at 97 [mph], and then the next you're 98, 99. And that wasn't the case this year... Looking back, I don't think that really helped."

Skenes did let it eat while pitching for Team USA during the WBC, averaging 97.7 mph on his fastball. He's only averaged 96.8 mph during the regular season, which has coincided with his ERA basically doubling relative to 2025.

Hence the faint echoes to what the WBC may have done to Raleigh. "Big Dumper" himself has alluded to the event having thrown his timing off. Manny Acta even suggested that the oblique strain that hindered Raleigh earlier in the year happened because of the WBC. If you buy this stuff, then you get a convenient excuse for one of the great year-to-year declines in history.

Now then, who wants to call BS?

World Baseball Classic falls short as an excuse for Cal Raleigh, Paul Skenes

Though the World Baseball Classic is always a convenient boogeyman when something goes wrong, the ratio of participants to bad seasons is hardly 1:1. This year, for example, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Junior Caminero are among those who are having huge years after playing in the WBC.

This doesn't mean Skenes' own words should be written off, but it's not unfair to be skeptical. He had his best velocity of the year in April, mere weeks after pitching in the WBC. He was let down by his defense on Opening Day, but then ripped off a 1.09 ERA over his next eight starts. It's not what you'd expect from a guy if he was truly messed up by the WBC.

If anything, the WBC excuse fits better on Raleigh.

He had a devil of a time getting his bat going even during the tournament, going 0-for-9 before Team USA manager Mark DeRosa had him hit the pine. There was also the Randy Arozarena thing and a post-WBC rush to get at-bats in during the last days of spring training, which may have been when he overworked his oblique. Given all that, perhaps it's unsurprising that he was cold from the get-go in a season that has seen him fall from a .948 OPS and 60 homers to a .670 OPS and 23 homers.

Yet as one Mariner told Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times, the team stopped talking about the Arozarena-Raleigh thing during spring training. And even if Raleigh's WBC experience works as an explanation for his early slump, can it really account for a season-long slump?

The .246 average he has in September marks the first time all year that he hasn't batted under the Mendoza line for a given month. Particularly after he came back from an IL stint for the oblique strain in June, his struggles looked a lot more like a failure to adjust. That went on until August, for which you have to credit pitchers for how they attacked Raleigh and blame him and the coaching staff for being so slow to adapt accordingly.

When it comes down to it, it's hard not to think of the Mariners' season as a slow-moving disaster that began back in March. But given how many other things went wrong and how bad the Mariners were at making fixes, the WBC is ultimately a weak excuse.

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