Cal Raleigh

Seattle Mariners star catcher Cal Raleigh’s 2025 season is one for the history books. In order to understand what the stocky slugger has done, it helps to understand those whose history he has rewritten.

• He surpassed Salvador Perez’s 2021 record of 48 home runs by a catcher in a single season, which had eclipsed the 45 hit by the legendary Johnny Bench in 1970.
• He eclipsed the record for most home runs hit by a Mariner (56) in a season, which had been held by the legendary Ken Griffey, Jr.
• He shattered Mickey Mantle’s record (54) for most home runs hit in a season by a switch hitter. (Do we need to mention that Mantle is the stuff of baseball legend?)
• He became the first catcher to win the All-Star Game Home Run Derby, with his dad pitching to him and his kid brother doing the catching.
• He joined an elite club as only the seventh player in Major League history to hit 60 or more home runs in a single season. He is the only catcher ever to have achieved that mark.

That 2025 marked Raleigh’s fourth full season in the major leagues indicates the potential for the legend to continue to grow.

Growing up

Cal Raleigh grew up in a family of sports enthusiasts. His parents, Todd and Stephanie Raleigh, ran a printing company, and Todd Raleigh also coached baseball at the collegiate level. Cal’s sisters, Emma-Grace and Carley, played volleyball in college, and his younger brother, Todd, Jr., also plays baseball. The family had a batting cage in their backyard.

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Todd Raleigh taught his son to bat from both the left and right side of the plate. As he recalled in a 2025 interview with the North State Journal, “I did it from the first day. I mean, when he was in diapers, literally.…He had a big red bat.” But none of that guaranteed success. When Cal Raleigh was 14 and trying out for his high school’s team in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family had moved, the head coach delivered a devastating assessment of the young athlete’s prospects:

“Not good enough. [He] can’t make the team. If he works really, really hard, one day he’ll be a Division III player.”

Todd Raleigh left his coaching job at the University of Tennessee and moved the family back to North Carolina, in part to focus on Cal’s baseball prospects. Cal Raleigh credits his father’s belief and dedication for his professional success: “He’s a big reason why I’m here,” Raleigh told The New York Times in 2025.

By the time Raleigh was in his senior year at Smoky Mountain High School, he had turned into a power hitter, smashing 10 home runs in his final season. He attracted the attention of Division I scouts and went on to play at Florida State University.

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Early career

Raleigh was drafted by the Seattle Mariners in the 2018 MLB draft. He was the 90th player chosen, and there were real questions about whether he had the physique and skills to make it at the major league level. Early results were far from promising. He made his major league debut in July 2021, but he batted just .180 for the rest of the season. His 2022 season started off so badly that he was sent back to the minor leagues.

“I was just angry at the world,” Raleigh remembers of that time in his career—until his father talked to him and told him to focus. Raleigh did just that, and when a Mariners catcher was injured, he got another chance at the big leagues. This time he made it count.

In the first two months he was back with the Mariners, Raleigh hit 9 home runs on his way to 27 for the 2022 season. His defensive skills were just as impressive, catching 25 runners trying to steal bases during the season, the best in the American League that season. And so it seemed fitting that on September 30, 2022, with the Mariners needing a win to make it to the postseason for the first time in 21 years, Raleigh came to the plate as a pinch-hitter at the bottom of the ninth in a 1–1 game against the then-Oakland Athletics. He hit a booming walk-off homer that sent his team to the playoffs and began the stuff of legend.

Finding the groove

The 2023 and 2024 seasons would be bittersweet for Raleigh, who continued to dominate defensively and racked up 30 and 34 home runs, respectively. But the Mariners failed to make the playoffs, being eliminated on the final weekend of regular season each year.

So the start of the 2025 season came with questions for the team and for Raleigh. Before the first game, Seattle announced that it had signed Raleigh to a six-year contract extension that would pay him $105 million, assuring his continued presence in a Mariner uniform.

Raleigh hit 38 home runs in the first half of the season, a blistering pace that exceeded the total number he had hit in any major league season, earned him his first spot on the American League All-Star team, and sparked a previously inconceivable debate over who would be named the Most Valuable Player in the American League: Aaron Judge or Cal Raleigh. It also landed him in the Home Run Derby, the meaningless but nevertheless exciting spectacle held the day before the All-Star Game. Days before the derby a video clip of an 8-year-old Raleigh surfaced in which he proclaimed, “I’m the Home Run Derby champ!” Twenty years later Raleigh made that come true, beating Junior Caminero for the title and becoming the first catcher to win the derby.

The second half of the season saw Raleigh keep up the pace, winding up with 60 home runs, as he helped lead the Mariners to a division title and back into the playoffs. The Mariners were eliminated from the playoffs by the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series in seven games. Despite his outstanding season, Raleigh was edged out for American League Most Valuable Player honors by the Yankees’ Aaron Judge.

What other players have hit 60 home runs in a season?

In 2025, Cal Raleigh joined one of baseball’s most elite clubs: sluggers who have recorded 60 or more dingers in a single season. Here they are:

• Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs for the New York Yankees in 1927.
• Roger Maris hit 61 homers for the Yankees in 1961.
• Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1998 and 65 in 1999. That number, however, is widely considered to have been impacted by McGwire’s use of steroids.
• Sammy Sosa, in a legendary home run battle with McGwire, hit 66 in 1998, 63 in 1999, and 64 in 2001. Like McGwire, Sosa’s numbers are thought to be impacted by steroid use, although Sosa has never admitted to that.
• Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs for the San Francisco Giants in 2001, but that record is marred by his admitted use of steroids.
• Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs for the Yankees in 2022.
• Cal Raleigh hit 60 home runs for the Seattle Mariners in 2025.