Cal Raleigh is back.
The Seattle Mariners star, after backing up a breakout campaign in 2025 with a very rough go this season, seems to have found his stride again. Raleigh rattled off three home runs to help lift the Mariners to a 9-2 win over the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday night. It was the first ever three-homer game of his career.
Advertisement
Raleigh opened the night with a two-run shot to right in the first inning at T-Mobile Park, which helped push the Mariners to a 5-1 lead. It was the second home run of the inning for Seattle, too, following Julio Rodríguez’s three-run shot.
Raleigh then followed suit with a deep solo homer in the fifth inning, which extended the Mariners’ lead. The first two homers both came off Phillies starter Zack Wheeler.
And finally, Raleigh just barely got his third one over the wall in right field in the seventh inning for good measure. All three of his homers were on nearly identical trajectories.
Raleigh entered Monday night with just a .159 batting average with 47 RBI and only 14 home runs. It was only two weeks ago that Raleigh — who drilled 60 home runs, made his first All-Star team and won the Home Run Derby in 2025 — sounded incredibly down about his play during a losing skid.
“It’s not good,” he said. “We’re not playing well. That starts with me. I’m awful. I’ve got to find a way to be better and to help bring the guys along. We just gotta play better. We’re just playing very, very, very bad baseball in every facet of the game. We gotta pick it up — from the energy standpoint to the execution to the little things in the game that help you win baseball games. We’re just not doing those things right now.”
The win marked Seattle’s third in its last four outings, though it entered Monday fresh off a 19-2 beatdown by the Chicago Cubs. The win moved the Mariners to 63-69 on the year, three games back of the AL West-leading Texas Rangers and three games back of the AL’s final wild-card spot.
Advertisement
With a little more than a month left in the regular season, they are running out of time to make a move.
One game won’t break him out of his funk completely, but Monday’s outing was a flash of the greatness that Raleigh showed throughout 2025. Whether that’s enough to spark a late rally for the Mariners and get a postseason push going, though, remains to be seen.
Read the full article here