Cal Raleigh Hit Three Home Runs in One Night. It Took All Season.
Cal Raleigh came into Monday batting .115 for August. He hit three home runs that night, and no Mariner had ever done that at T-Mobile Park.
Cal Raleigh hit three home runs against the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday, August 24, and the Mariners won 9-2. No Seattle player had ever hit three in one night at T-Mobile Park. But the record is the smallest part of the story, because Raleigh spent 2026 losing almost everything a hitter can lose. This is the season that made those three swings matter.
Last year, Raleigh rewrote the catcher’s record book
Raleigh entered 2026 as the best power-hitting catcher alive. In 2025 he hit 60 home runs. Sixty! That is the most ever by a catcher, and he passed Mickey Mantle’s switch-hitter mark of 54 along the way. The awards followed the homers: a Silver Slugger, the first ever for a Mariners catcher, then the Home Run Derby title, the first ever for a catcher at all. The players voted him the AL’s Outstanding Player, and he finished second in MVP voting. Seattle had already signed him through 2030.
2026 took the swing first, then a month of the season
The new season honored none of that. Raleigh opened the year stuck at the plate, and then the trouble turned physical. Seattle put him on the injured list with a right oblique strain on May 14, the first IL stint of his career. For a catcher, the oblique is not a background muscle. It powers the swing and the throw, sometimes in the same half-inning.
Raleigh missed 33 days and did the rehab right: High-A Everett first, then Triple-A Tacoma, where he went 7-for-17 with five home runs. He returned on June 16 and singled home two runs in a 3-1 win over Baltimore. Then the bat went quiet for a week. His first home run back came on June 23, a solo shot off Pittsburgh’s Mitch Keller and his first in 57 days.
One swing did not lift the slump. Raleigh reached the All-Star break batting .169, and the split against his 2025 first half says it plainer than adjectives can:
| Stat | 2025 first half | 2026 first half |
|---|---|---|
| AVG | .259 | .169 |
| OBP | .376 | .271 |
| SLG | .634 | .310 |
| HR | 38 | 9 |
| RBI | 82 | 29 |
The numbers under the numbers mattered more. Driveline Baseball found his contact point had slipped from 5.2 inches in front of the plate to 1.9, too deep for a pull-side power hitter. Yet his bat speed never left the 77th percentile. The talent stayed while the timing drifted, and that slump was protracted: it stretched across months, and it played out in public.
So Raleigh stood at a microphone in St. Petersburg on July 18 and named the problem out loud. “We have not played good baseball,” he said. “That is just the straight fact.”
The answers came one swing at a time
Three nights later, Cincinnati handed him a test. Manager Terry Francona had lefty Caleb Ferguson intentionally walk Dominic Canzone to load the bases and bring up Raleigh instead. The move said out loud what the league was thinking: the Home Run King was 0-for-15, so pitching to him looked safe. Raleigh hit Ferguson’s first pitch into the second deck of left-center field for his sixth career grand slam. Seattle won 8-0 and moved into first place in the AL West.
But August found a lower floor. Raleigh’s average for the month sat at .115, and Seattle dropped him in the batting order. Half of his August hits were home runs, which is another way of saying the singles had vanished. Our swing breakdown traced it to two stacked flaws: his front hip was opening early, and his hands were dropping, so his swing-and-miss rate on four-seam fastballs nearly doubled.
Even then, the at-bats kept paying in moments. The Cubs out-slugged Seattle early on August 22, and Raleigh answered with a three-run homer, his 14th. The Mariners won 6-5 in ten innings.
Three home runs, all to the pull side
Two nights later, Zack Wheeler and the Phillies arrived carrying a nine-game winning streak. Julio Rodriguez hit a three-run homer and Raleigh added a two-run shot in a five-run first inning. In the fifth, Raleigh and Cole Young went back-to-back, and Wheeler was gone before the sixth. When reliever Chase Shugart came on in the seventh, Raleigh drove a third home run to the same part of the park.
All three went to right field, and every one came from his left-handed stance. That detail carries the whole season. An early front hip is exactly what pulls a left-handed hitter off his pull side. So three straight homers to right field mean the hip stayed closed and the hands arrived on time. The flaw he had chased since June finally let go.
Seattle won 9-2 and ended Philadelphia’s streak. Raleigh became the first Seattle player with a three-homer game in T-Mobile Park’s 27-year history, and the 13th Mariner ever to have one. Edgar Martinez was the last to do it at home, at the Kingdome on May 18, 1999. The Kingdome closed that summer. Raleigh’s season total reached 17.
A season average counts everything, so Raleigh’s will remember the trials longer than the tributes. But the swing is not the average. Raleigh kept working when the results left: he climbed back through the minors after the oblique, said the problem out loud in July, then drilled the one named flaw until it released. Mechanics are never solved; they are maintained. Because he maintained his through the worst month of his career, he was ready on the night the timing returned.
That could be you in your next slump: not the player waiting for the swing to come back, but the one working the flaw until it does.
Try this at your next practice
- Pull-field tee work. Set the tee on the inner third and drive every ball to your pull side. Keep your lead hip closed until your hands fire; if the ball leaks the other way, the hip opened early. Ten to fifteen slow reps per session is plenty.
- Pressure at-bat simulation. Before a round of batting practice, call the situation out loud: runners on, two outs, down a run. Then swing with the situation, not just the pitch. Raleigh’s grand slam was one pitch because he was ready before it arrived.
- Season-and-moment journaling. After each game, write down one thing you did well behind the plate. A season number counts everything, but your value shows up one moment at a time, and so does the way back. Sweat the gear and never fear.
Sources: Cal Raleigh’s first-career three-homer game (MLB.com) · Mariners rout red-hot Phillies (Hawaii Tribune-Herald) · Mariners snap Phillies’ 9-game win streak (WDEL.com) · Mariners 9-2 Phillies game recap (ESPN) · Raleigh joins Griffey Jr. in Mariners record books (Yardbarker) · MLB Stats API game log (June 23 home run verified 2026-08-31)