Cal Raleigh hit three home runs Monday night to snap the Phillies’ nine-game winning streak, and the fact that almost nobody outside Seattle noticed says more about how thin national baseball coverage has gotten than it does about Raleigh’s season.
Per ESPN’s recap, Raleigh went 3-for-3 with a walk, four RBI and three runs scored as the Mariners blew out the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-2, at T-Mobile Park. All three homers came off the left side, all three pulled to right. Two came off Zack Wheeler, including a two-run shot in a five-run first inning that also featured a Julio Rodriguez three-run blast. The third came off reliever Chase Shugart in the seventh.
It was the first three-homer game of Raleigh’s career. It was also his first multi-homer game of the entire 2026 season.
That’s the part everyone’s skipping.
This wasn’t peak Cal Raleigh doing peak Cal Raleigh things. This was a guy hitting .159 for most of the season, his slugging percentage cratering from .589 last year to .304 this year, finally breaking out of the worst stretch of his career on a random Monday against the hottest team in the sport. It’s not like the slump was some hidden secret, either — Raleigh already got mocked for his batting average to his face earlier this year.
UPI’s wire report laid out the stakes on the other side. Philadelphia had won nine straight, its best run of the season, and had crawled to within a few games of Atlanta in the NL East before Raleigh single-handedly shut it down. His own average ticked up to .167 on the night. He’s still nowhere near the guy who led the majors with 60 homers and finished as AL MVP runner-up a year ago.
He still authored one of the wilder nights in franchise history doing it. Raleigh became the 13th player in Mariners history with a three-homer game and the first one ever at T-Mobile Park. He’s also only the second Mariners catcher to do it — the first was Dan Wilson, back in 1996.
Wilson is the Mariners’ manager these days. Told about the connection, he didn’t try to make it a moment: “I think there’s no comparison,” he said.
The Mariners’ video board had some fun with it too:
https://twitter.com/RyanDivish/status/2092109676016283724
A team having a private laugh about a moment nobody outside the building saw. The rest of the country spent Monday night glued to Boston and New York playing out the AL East drama instead.
I texted the box score to my sister, who’s still at Rutgers and thinks baseball ends whenever the NFL preseason starts feeling real. Her response was “wait who is this.” She wasn’t being a jerk. She genuinely didn’t know, and that’s the whole point.
Now, if Raleigh strings together a real second half and finishes with 25-plus home runs, this stops being a story about attention and turns into a story about a guy who fought out of the worst slump of his career. That outcome is very much alive: Raleigh himself talked afterward about the team’s “endurance” and finally squaring up fastballs he’d been missing all summer.
But right now, on a Monday nobody outside the Pacific Northwest was watching, he took down the hottest team in baseball by himself, and it barely dented a news cycle already locked onto the Phillies’ surge back into the NL East race. Baseball’s national conversation has room for exactly one storyline at a time these days.
Monday, it just wasn’t him.
