You're On Pace to Read One of These Today.

Catching up: fun with Cal's numbers!

Thanks for reading The Dope. You’ve once again made a hellaciously wise decision.

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We got excited back in May because Aaron Judge was hitting .423 through the Yankees’ first 34 games, at a time when MLB’s league-wide qualified* batting average was .242. He’s hitting nearly 200 points higher than Joe Replacement! we said, and it was true at the time. It also didn’t last, but I think we all knew that it wouldn’t, because no one is going to hit .400 over the course of a full season in the pitcher-dominated 2020s.

(* ‘Qualified’ in this context means that you need to have recorded a certain number of at-bats for your average to count in these types of computations. If you went 7 for your first 14 on the season, then pulled a hammy running from second base to third and have been on the injured list ever since, congratulations — you’re batting .500. But you don’t factor in here.)

Judge is currently scraping by at .337, which only leads the rest of baseball by 20 points. He’s not “on pace” to do anything with that gaudy number, because batting average isn’t a counting stat — it measures instead how often one is safely putting the ball in play. A nearly 34% success rate in this insanely difficult sport is fantastic, but let’s face it: We like the stats you can play with.

Like this:

Cal Raleigh is on pace for 61 home runs.

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It is true! Also, Cal Raleigh is a player for the Seattle Mariners.

I’m not sure what it’ll take for semi-regular baseball fans to fully understand how good Raleigh is, but if name recognition remains a bit of an issue (and for some reason it does), then flirting with Ruth/Maris territory is one way around that.

Now, home runs are indeed a counting stat. These are the kinds of numbers we can have fun with. We understand home runs as an historic statistical artifact and a solid numerical figure, and we also understand what a home run is, which is helpful. We don’t care how they’re hit, we don’t care when and we usually don’t care why. We just watch them fly until they land, and when they stop rolling we start tallying up the damage.

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So Cal Raleigh’s case can be reduced to simple, definable figures, which may then be extrapolated with all the innocence and lack of guile of a kid reaching for a box of Whoppers. As of this typing, the Mariners’ catcher had 45 home runs through the team’s first 119 games. That works out to 61.26 homers over 162 games. We’ll round down.

Do you see how elegantly we just avoided every single distraction factor? We did not consider whether the homers were mostly well struck or were fluky wall-scrapers that somehow skimmed past unobservant outfielders on last-place teams. We did not ask how many of those 119 games Cal Raleigh himself has played. We did not factor weather, injury, quality of opposing pitcher, dimension of ballpark, specific pitch selection, stitch quality of the baseball, propensity of the home plate umpire to have missed a key call earlier in each HR at-bat — none of that rot.

Nope! We just added up the homers and divided by the number of games played, then multiplied by 162.

Here:

45/119 = 0.00378151261 x 162 = 0.6126

For the record, though, Raleigh had played in 116 games as of Monday — that’s 116 of Seattle’s 119 games. This is good. It reinforces something we’ve long suspected, which is that it’s easier to pile up counting stats if you constantly show up for work. (Pro tip.)

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Since I know you’re wondering, Raleigh does not have a lot of fluke attached to his effort. He plays his home games in a ballpark that suppresses offensive numbers more than any other in MLB, yet Cal has 22 of his 45 home runs at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Like every prodigious home run hitter, he will occasionally go on a power jag, such as the four-day span in June in which he hit five tanks. But Raleigh is really a model of consistency, not spasm:

March/April — 10 homers.

May — 12.

June — 11.

July — 9. (Had the All-Star break.)

August — 3, in nine games.

He’s a switch-hitter with absurd power from both sides — a .901 OPS as a lefty and 1.054 on the right. And because he has remained healthy, a feat aided by the Mariners’ choice to use him as a designated hitter 29 times so far, we can honestly say he is “on pace” to reach 61.

My favorite part may be that Raleigh plays on a winning team. The Mariners are good — 66-53 through those first 119, half a game behind the Astros in the American League West. After years of searching for an offense, they are a top-10 team in runs scored and third in home runs, trailing only the Yankees (Judge) and Dodgers (Ohtani). They’re getting good offensive numbers from several players: Randy Arozarena, Julio Rodriguez, J.P. Crawford, Jorge Polanco.

But it starts and ends with the Big Dumper, and even the mild threat of Raleigh reaching 60 home runs is something that Seattle fans have waited for since Ken Griffey Jr. was running around the outfield at the Kingdome in the late ‘90s.

The Mariners don’t have the easiest schedule coming down the stretch, and the competition is about to get a little more intense for them in several key series. But could Seattle make the playoffs and see one of its own guys reach 60 or 61 homers in the same season? You won’t believe it: They’re on pace to do both.

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