The Historical Collapse of Cal Raleigh

This season has been outright horrible for Seattle Mariners fans. A team that went to Game 7 of the ALCS last year and had huge hopes for this year has been awful. They’ve totally given up as a team and have ever since shortly after the All Star Break. The vaunted pitching staff–no real ace, but five above average starters–has been bad in the second half. Julio Rodriguez has disappointed all season and is mentally completely checked out now, making the kind idiotic brain farts that get players benched on multiple occasions in the last two weeks. Josh Naylor has been nothing since he signed his big contract. Brendan Donovan was supposed to be the answer at third, but he’s been hurt all year. The management of the relievers has been poor. Closer Andres Munoz has been rough all season. It just sucks.

And then there’s Cal Raleigh. Now, in the last week, for the first time all year, Raleigh has looked liked last year, when he set a record for catchers with 60 home runs, was 2nd in the AL MVP race, and captured the baseball world’s imagination with his home run derby victory. This year….even after a great last week, he’s hitting .171/288/353. Last year his OPS+ was 168. This year it is 84. His defense has been fine, but he’s totally lost any sense of the strike zone for months at a time, not swinging at meat and then swinging at shit way out of the zone.

Last year, Raleigh was worth 7.2 WAR. This year, he is at 0.5 and two weeks ago, he was below zero. So I wondered, what are the biggest single season collapses in major league history? I don’t know if this is definitive, but here’s a 2015 article on the issue. The five hitters listed are Max Carey, who fell from 4.2 in 1925 to -1.2 in 1926; Sal Bando (5.6 in 1978, 0.7 in 1979), Jim Rice (5.6 in 1986 to 0.2 in 1987), Ted Simmons (4 in 1983 to an obscenely horrible -2.6 in 1985), and Roberto Alomar (7.3 in 2001 to 0.6 in 2002).

So as of this moment, Raleigh would tie Alomar for the biggest single season collapse in batting history. But, there’s a caveat that makes this even worse. What happened with all these other guys is that they got old. All five of them can be explained largely by the fact that they were really good and then turned 33 or 34 and their bodies just couldn’t do it anymore. They all hung around for a year or two and then retired. Cal Raleigh is 29 years old. It’s true that catching is tough. However, other than a brief IR stint earlier in the year, no one is claiming this is a health issue. He’s just been basically unique in totally losing whatever made him good over an offseason.

For the Mariners sake and for my own, I hope he can figure this out. I don’t expect any catcher to be setting records. Raleigh has always been streaky and so long droughts are something you live with here. Last year, it was more long scorching hot streaks, but even then there were a few droughts. But this? Good lord. I’d take a WAR of 3.5 next year. That might not relaunch the Mariners’ future, but at least he wouldn’t go down in baseball history for all the wrong reasons after all the right reasons just last year.

Seems like a good time for a sports thread too. We need more of these at LGM anyway. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go play with their Star Wars action figures.