Cal Raleigh stood in front of reporters after Seattle's 4-1 loss to the Yankees on Tuesday night, looked at a .159 average, and did the thing very few stars do. He took it. "I've got to find a way to be better," he said. That is Cal Raleigh's struggles in a sentence, and it is the fifth straight loss for a Mariners team that is now 56-64 and running out of calendar.
The number is the shock. One year removed from finishing second in the AL MVP race, the best offensive season a catcher has ever put together, and he is hitting .159. Not slumping. Submerged.
What's behind Cal Raleigh's struggles in 2026?
Honestly, I don't have a swing diagnosis in front of me, and I'm not going to invent one. Nobody has released a mechanical breakdown, there's no injury news attached to this, and Raleigh himself didn't offer an excuse. He offered accountability. That's the whole quote and it's worth sitting with, because the easy move for a player in an August free fall is to talk about hard-hit rate and bad luck and the shape of the schedule. He went the other way.
What I do know is what the position does to people. Catcher is the only job in the sport where your body is a workplace hazard and your at-bats are the fourth-most important thing you did that day. A guy who carried a monster offensive load in 2025 while squatting behind the plate every night is not a mystery when his bat goes quiet the following summer. That's not a diagnosis. It's context, and context is most of what August is for.
from the almanac: raleigh's 60 home runs in 2025 pushed past mickey mantle's 54 in 1961, the switch-hitting record that had stood for sixty-four years. a year later he's talking about finding a way to be better. baseball does not care what you did in october.
Where do the Mariners stand in the AL West?
The streak is the bigger problem than the batting average, and the standings say so. Seattle is third in the AL West at 56-64. Texas, sitting at 60-60, is the club directly ahead of them. Five straight losses in mid-August is not a rough patch, it's a subtraction, and it turns a season that still had a pulse three weeks ago into one that needs help from other people's scoreboards.
| Team | Record | AL West |
|---|---|---|
| Texas Rangers | 60-60 | 2nd |
| Seattle Mariners | 56-64 | 3rd |
| Los Angeles Angels | 46-74 | 5th |
The Yankees, meanwhile, are 67-52 and second in the AL East, playing like a team that intends to be inconvenient in October. Tuesday's 4-1 win was the kind of game good clubs bank without breaking a sweat.
What comes next for Cal Raleigh and Seattle
The two teams go again Wednesday at 7:05 PM ET in the Bronx, and Seattle's job is simple to say and hard to do: stop the bleeding, get one, go home. For Raleigh, the next few weeks are less about the average printed on the scoreboard and more about whether the swing looks like his again. A .159 August can be fixed. A .159 August where a player hides cannot, and he already told us which one he's choosing.
There is also a version of this that ends well and doesn't show up in a box score. Seattle has a young roster that watched its best player absorb a five-game losing streak in public and not pass the check to anybody else. That is a thing teams remember. It doesn't win Wednesday. It matters anyway.
What I'm watching: whether Raleigh is in the lineup for every game of this stretch or whether Seattle starts giving him scheduled air, because how a club manages a struggling everyday catcher in August tells you exactly how it sees the rest of its season.
