The way Seattle Mariners’ Cal Raleigh excels as a hitter

The Seattle Mariners recently released a video with their five hardest hits from the 2024 season, so of course I watched it because who doesn’t love watching hitters line up a baseball perfectly?

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As I perceived the hits, I made two observations.

The first is pretty obvious: the entire roster featured the same two players – Luke Raley and Cal Raleigh. The lack of an appearance from Julio Rodríguez was perhaps a bit surprising, but I think that says more about how strong Raley and Raleigh are than it does about Rodríguez. And if you remember Raley hitting a hit in right field against the Phillies at T-Mobile Park, you know what to expect at No. 1 on the list.

The second observation concerns Raleigh in particular. He had two inclusions and ranked #2 and #3 on the list. And strangely enough, they came from the same game — a two-homer night on July 11 in Anaheim, California, against the Angels. Seattle’s switch catcher was obviously doing pretty well that day.

However, my observation is not so much that the hits occurred on the same day. Actually, I just hinted at what it was. Raleigh’s two hardest hits last season were evenly distributed on both sides of the plate. That night, as a left-handed hitter, Raleigh hit a 113.9 mph home run over the line in right field. And later in the game, he turned to his right side and fired a near-penetrating copy into the left-field corner with an exit velocity of 113.8 mph.

This got me thinking: How many other switch hitters consistently hit the ball from both sides as hard as Raleigh? The answer: It’s in a class of its own.

I dug into some Statcast rankings for the 2024 season and found that Raleigh ranks 18th in all of baseball in the number of “barrels” (definition here) per plate appearance. Among the players ranked above Raleigh are only two other switch-hitters: New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor (No. 14) and Gig Harbor High School product and Colorado Rockies first baseman Michael Toglia (No. 15). But when you look at Lindor and Toglia’s hardest hits in 2024, there wasn’t a single hit with an exit velocity of at least 113 mph, let alone a hit each to the right and left.

Now, if you go through the table of each player’s hardest batted-bat events, you’ll only find five switch hitters with harder hits than Raleigh’s best. And among those, only one player from either side hit harder than Raleigh: Reds phenom Elly de la Cruz, who was the only switch hitter to top an exit velocity of 114 mph on both sides of the plate. But the shortstop from Cincinnati had an appearance rate of 7.3% barrels per plate, putting him 39 spots behind Raleigh on this leaderboard.

In general, the switch hitters who have had at least one at-bat with a higher exit velocity than Raleigh are either much better on one side of the plate (like Arizona’s Ketel Marte, an ex-Mariner who crushes lefty pitchers) or had a hit that was an outlier (like Cleveland’s José Ramírez, who had one hit with an exit velocity of 116.6 mph, but no other that even reached 110 mph).

Raleigh, who turned 28 last month, has always been a powerful hitter, but it wasn’t until this year that he was able to hit the same ball on both sides of the plate. In 2024, he hit a career-high 34 home runs, and a big reason for that is that he hit 13 from the right side and 21 from the left side. Compare that to 2023, when Raleigh had just four home runs as a right-hander and 26 as a left-hander. In his career, Raleigh has 20 home runs from the right side and 73 from the left side, entering this year with just seven as a right-handed hitter.

The point is, this Cal Raleigh guy the Mariners have is pretty incredible as he showed in 2024 that he can be the hardest-hitting switch-hitter in the game. Add that to the fact that he not only won his first Gold Glove this year, but also earned the Platinum Glove award as the American League’s best overall defensive player, and you realize what a special player he is.

Maybe the MLB will even be able to name him an All-Star next year. Yeah, I don’t know how this hasn’t happened yet.

Seattle Mariners offseason coverage

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• Here’s a look at who the Seattle Mariners could take at No. 3 overall in the 2025 MLB Draft

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