Halfway through this Major League Baseball season, the hitter on a historic home-run pace is not Aaron Judge, the reigning American League MVP, nor Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto, the sport’s $700 million sluggers.
It’s Cal Raleigh, the Seattle catcher whose previous career-high for home runs in a season was 34, and who plays a position, and in a home ballpark, that has never been known for producing prolific home-run hitters.
And yet, in only the first 96 games of the season, Raleigh has already hit 38 homers, the second-most ever before the All-Star break. A primary catcher has never hit 50 home runs in a single season; the record belongs to Salvador Perez’s 48, from 2021.
It is the season’s biggest surprise. Yet it did not come out of nowhere.
Specifically, it came from Modesto, California, and Raleigh’s career-changing month of minor-league baseball in 2019 that first suggested such a historic tear was possible. When many close to Raleigh are asked to explain the origins of his All-Star season with Seattle, they draw a straight line back to the half-season he spent with the Modesto Nuts, and the subtle changes to his hitting that are still paying off today.
“I was just texting a buddy that I worked with in the minor leagues that was around during that season,” said Taylor Bennett, now an assistant athletic trainer for the Mariners who, in 2019, was working for the Modesto Nuts when Raleigh joined. “And I was like, ‘This year seems like Modesto when he was on the heater.’ But, it just hasn’t stopped.”
When Nuts manager Denny Hocking went searching for Raleigh on the afternoon of June 20, 2019, Raleigh was decidedly not on a heater at the plate. It was the only blemish on his otherwise strong second professional season since Seattle had drafted Raleigh in the third round out of college.
Two days earlier, Raleigh had represented Modesto in the all-star game of the Cal League, a division of single-A teams clustered in northern and Southern California, and among the lower rungs of minor-league baseball. One knock on Raleigh out of college concerned his defensive potential. Yet in Modesto, empowered by coaches to run meetings directly with the Nuts’ pitching staff, he earned the trust of pitchers by making them look good. He showed up hours early to the ballpark, having scouted how their pitches could prevent opponents from getting on base. And if they did, he strengthened his arm to catch them stealing.
When Raleigh arrived at the home of Catherine and John Benning south of Modesto before the season began, the Bennings repeated the instructions they had told dozens of minor-leaguers they’d hosted during previous seasons. The players could expect barbecue tri-tips after Sunday day games, to feel free to add to the family’s grocery list and, on rare days off for the Nuts, the Bennings would offer to take players on day trips to show them Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe or the beach. Raleigh almost always declined such offers, however. He preferred studying upcoming opponents on his iPad from their couch, or asking whether Michael Sadler, the Nuts’ strength and conditioning coach, could come hang out by the family’s pool. When the family welcomed a new grandson in 2019, Raleigh held the infant in an easy chair, allowing the infant to wrap its hand around his index finger.
“He just wanted to hang out, swim, relax, get pedicures with my daughter,” Catherine Benning said. “… I just tell people, he’s just the nicest, nicest kid.”
It wasn’t the only place where Raleigh was building rapport. At 6-foot-2 and pushing 230 pounds, Raleigh was among the roster’s bigger players, and he embraced his frame by helping form a club he nicknamed the “Beef Boy.” Raleigh’s parents, who owned a screen-printing business in his North Carolina hometown, had sent T-shirts with the outline of a cow and the words: “100% Pure Beef, No Added Steroids or Fillers.” Raleigh had also written a Beef Boy song with lyrics to the tune of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.”
“The qualifier to be a Beef Boy was that you had to be over like 225, 230 and you had to hit tanks,” Bennett said.
Yet Raleigh was not hitting tanks when Hocking found the catcher underneath the Valley Strong Ballpark in Visalia, California, on June 20.
After hitting seven homers in the season’s first 30 games, Raleigh hit just one in his last 29, one of several hitting metrics that had regressed.
Hocking had scratched out a 13-year career in MLB by understanding the nuances of hitting. And what he had heard that day from a Mariners coach overseeing the hitting of the team’s prospects had concerned him.
“He was like, ‘Man, I was talking to Cal, and his approach [as a hitter] is not, ‘Yes-yes-yes-no,’ it’s, ‘Maybe I should swing, maybe I shouldn’t,'” Hocking said. “And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ And immediately I leave my office, and I’m like, ‘Cal, let’s go,’ and we go into the cage.
“I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me — your process in the batter’s box isn’t, swing-swing-swing-don’t swing, it’s just, maybe I’m gonna swing at this pitch, maybe I won’t?’ And he looked at me like, yeah, what’s wrong with that? I’m like, dude.”
Hocking told Raleigh that hitting, like changing lanes on a freeway, depends on quick decision-making. There simply isn’t time to process or to be timid in the less than a half-second it takes a 90-mile-per-hour fastball to reach home plate.
The son and nephew of coaches, Raleigh already had strong fundamentals with his swing that didn’t require remaking. Hocking made a small timing change to where Raleigh, a switch-hitter, made contact with the ball, but wanted the change to be just one part of a mental checklist that Raleigh could refer to to hold himself accountable in the batter’s box.
“It was a little bit of a mechanical change, but more an approach standpoint of, ‘What do I want to do?’” Hocking said. “And then learning it and growing it, and within that confidence, now you become invincible. I think what he did in that short period of time was made something that is really hard, that looks really hard, simplify it in a way that it became second nature to him.”
Raleigh went 0-for-5 on June 20 in Visalia. But the following night, he hit a home run and drove in two runs. Over the next 22 games, he hit 14 home runs in 78 at-bats, with 31 runs batted in, and got on base via walks nearly as many times as he struck out, another significant shift from early in the season.
The Mariners did not make Raleigh available for an interview for this article, but in a 2020 interview he said the “one little adjustment” was more mental than mechanical.
“I was like, I kind of like this,” Raleigh said. “I don’t have to think about my swing as much. All I have to do is mentally get ready to hit.”
Prodded by Hocking, the Nuts liked to perform karaoke on their bus during road trips throughout California — Raleigh sang country, Bennett recalled — and during Raleigh’s hot streak, the party atmosphere could continue into each game.
“When he was going through that stretch there of just being absolutely on fire, it was like, man, this guy is the real deal, and we’re seeing it firsthand,” Sadler said.
Raleigh’s changes to his hitting preparation was part of a much larger routine he was beginning to instill while in Modesto. When Raleigh arrived at the ballpark, hours before teammates, he would run through the same routine of hip and leg exercises to keep his legs mobile, and an arm-strengthening routine, with Sadler, Modesto’s strength coach, and Bennett, its trainer.
In the Nuts’ modest weight room, Raleigh’s strong lower body — his generous backside had earned him the nickname “Big Dumper” — allowed him to lay back with a bar across his hips and thrust more than 500 pounds upward.
“So, yes, his big dumper definitely is able to move some weight there,” Sadler said.
The strength allowed Raleigh to generate power and hit homers even when reaching for pitches that, for other hitters, may have turned into unthreatening bloopers.
“The man can move a house if he wanted to,” Bennett said.
The changes to how Raleigh approached his preparation and plate appearances didn’t take overnight. During a June 26 game in San Jose, less than a week after his discussion with Hocking about his hitting mindset, Raleigh took the first pitch without looking like he had any intent to swing, from Hocking’s dugout perspective.
“Almost like a statue,” Hocking said.
The manager stepped out onto the grass, “and I walked down the line and screamed at him in my own non-screaming way, just basically an angry question, ‘Hey, are you holding yourself accountable to your line?’
“I turn around and I go back, next pitch, he hits a tank.”
The at-bat was illustrative of what helped Raleigh on his tear through Class-A ball — and continues to fuel his success in Seattle, his coaches said. It isn’t so much his individual fielding, hitting or weight-room exploits that draws adulation; any player who makes the major leagues is a physical outlier. But “where [Raleigh] lives in the margins is the consistency,” Bennett said.
“I think everyone can can go back to a routine that worked for them and has continued to work for them throughout their career and their life, especially as a professional athlete,” Sadler said. “And Modesto is where he definitely found it.”
From July 3 to July 14, 2019, Raleigh hit nine home runs in 11 games, or nearly a home run every four at-bats. Raleigh would return home after yet another game with a home run “almost embarrassed if we even brought it up,” Benning said. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s another home run,’ and he’d just kind of smile and try to change the subject.”
Raleigh was called up to Seattle’s double-A team in Arkansas on July 15, a promotion that led him to the major leagues by 2021. In previous seasons, when Seattle would come through Southern California to play the Angels, Raleigh would often call Hocking and ask if he could hit in a hitting facility that Hocking operates a short drive from the Anaheim ballpark. The conversations often boiled down to ensuring Raleigh was still relying on the principles they’d worked on together in Modesto.
“The checkpoints that Denny came up with Cal in that span of time was two things, and kept it super simple, and I know he’s preached that to a ton of guys, but it seemed to click really well for Cal. And it is, are you on time? And if you are, did you swing at a good pitch?” Bennett said.
“He’s made finer adjustments as his game has progressed all the way to this point, but I think the basics are the basics, and I think he still operates within those basics of, you know, being on time and swinging at good pitches to hit.”
As Hocking shouted at Raleigh in San Jose, often the best pitch is the first pitch. That has remained true this season, where pitchers are wary of giving Raleigh many good looks over the plate. On first pitches, Raleigh has a .490 batting average, with 12 home runs.
Those close to Raleigh chuckle at the attention his prodigious production has earned the spotlight-averse catcher, as though they were let in on a secret before anyone else. And they describe themselves as unsurprised that stardom hasn’t severed their ties to Raleigh. Sadler, who is now the strength and conditioning director at Dakota Wesleyan University in South Dakota, said that Raleigh was a groomsman in his wedding, and last year became the godfather to his son — a boy named Cal.
Raleigh has left tickets for the Bennings and still returns their texts promptly. In recent years, after another of the Benning’s young grandsons died from cancer, Raleigh donated autographed jerseys to fundraisers for the family.
“Nobody deserves this like he does,” Catherine Benning said.
This season, when the Mariners came through Anaheim, Raleigh didn’t call Hocking. Hocking said he loved that — because it indicated his former catcher had cracked the code on the way to hitting 38 homers before the All-Star break.
“To do that in a half a season?” Hocking said. “Ridiculous.”
Some even say it’s Nuts.
