There are cold starts to a season — and then there’s this start from the Seattle Mariners, doing their very best to show us what baseball in Yakutsk, Russia, might look like.
In their first 13 games, the Mariners hit an abysmal .184, so despite a franchise-best 2.62 ERA over that span, they currently sit at the bottom of the standings with a disappointing 4-9 record. They got swept this week in Texas, scoring three total runs over three games and collecting just 11 hits, culminating in a lackluster two-hit shutout on Wednesday.
Most frustrating is their 2-3-4-5 hitters — Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodriguez, Josh Naylor and Randy Arozarena — are a combined 26-for-195 (.133) with just one home run. Rodriguez and Naylor are both without an extra-base hit, while Arozarena has three doubles, at least. Rodriguez has a total of seven hits on the season, and Naylor has just five to go with a minus-49 WRC+.
It’s Raleigh, however, who faces the early intense scrutiny out of that group, coming off his record-setting 60-home run season but off to a tough first two weeks. He’s hitting .143 with one home run on seven hits and a whopping 21 strikeouts, which is the second most in MLB.
With the Mariners hosting the division-rival Houston Astros in ESPN’s MLB Game of the Day at 9:40 p.m. ET on Saturday (available on the ESPN App), let’s dig into Raleigh’s start and see what’s going on with him — and his teammates.
Breaking down Raleigh’s at-bats
I watched all 55 of Raleigh’s plate appearances through Wednesday’s game — every single one of the 248 pitches he has seen. On the pleasure scale, this assignment rated somewhere between “eating a hot dog at the Kingdome back in the day that had probably been cooked three days earlier” and “watching Bobby Ayala close out games in 1998.”
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Here are takeaways from a number of notable at-bats:
Game 1/PA No. 2: Struck out swinging on an 0-2 changeup from Cleveland Guardians righty Tanner Bibee. A perfect pitch on the outside corner, diving away from Raleigh, no shame there. But the first pitch of the at-bat was a four-seam fastball right down the middle that Raleigh took for a strike.
Game 1/PA No. 4: Trailing 5-4 in the eighth inning, Raleigh got ahead 2-0 but swung over a slider from Erik Sabrowski, eventually striking out looking on a 2-2 slider that was outside (and which Raleigh should have challenged).
Game 2/PA No. 1: Raleigh struck out in an eight-pitch at-bat against Gavin Williams, fouling off a 3-2 cutter that was down the middle without much movement and then whiffing on a wicked 3-2 cutter that rode in off the plate.
Game 2/PA No. 4: Struck out looking against Peyton Pallette for his fourth strikeout of the game and seventh in two games. It was a curveball, way outside, a pitch that Raleigh, again, should have challenged.
We’ll note here that Raleigh — like Rodriguez, Naylor and Arozarena — played in this year’s World Baseball Classic. Much was made, of course, of Raleigh not shaking hands with Arozarena (and then Naylor in another game). However, after Arozarena’s apology for comments he made about the interaction in a postgame interview, everyone seemed to enter the regular season on good terms. With so many of their key players scattered across WBC teams, the Mariners had a terrible spring training at 11-19. When Raleigh did play, he scuffled, going 8-for-32 with one home run and 12 strikeouts and then went 0-for-9 in the WBC, getting benched for Will Smith for Team USA’s final two games. Yes, given all this, you can imagine that local sports radio in Seattle spends about two hours a day talking about the WBC.
Game 5/PA No. 1: Coming off the bench to pinch hit in a 1-1 game with two runners on against the New York Yankees, Raleigh got ahead 2-0 against lefty reliever Brent Headrick but then swung and missed at a slider way down out of the strike zone, eventually striking out on a good 2-2 splitter low and away.
Game 6/PA No. 4: After going 0-for-3 against lefty Max Fried, Raleigh again faced Headrick. The first pitch is a 93-mph fastball middle away that he swings through. He eventually strikes out swinging on the exact same pitch.
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A key to Raleigh’s monster 2025 season was his improvement against left-handed pitching. He hit .281/.351/.681 with 22 home runs in 185 at-bats against lefties, after hitting just .183 against them in 2024. Those two fastballs from Headrick were the type of middle-of-the-zone pitches that Raleigh demolished last year — from both sides of the plate.
Look at his numbers against pitches in the vertical middle of the strike zone, meaning around belt high:
2025: .290/.333/.695, 26 HRs in 210 at-bats2026: .105/.261/263, 1 HR in 19 at-bats
It’s obviously a very small sample size, but he wasn’t missing these pitches in 2025. His contact rate on them was 80.7% last year and is just 67.6% so far in 2026. His contact against pitches anywhere in the strike zone has declined from 78.4% to 65.8%. Even in 2024, that in-zone contact rate was 77.0%.
Raleigh is similar in some fashion to Bryce Harper in his swing decisions. Even though both draw a lot of walks, both also swing-and-miss a lot and chase out of the strike zone. Last year, Raleigh drew 97 walks even though his chase rate was below average, in the 25th percentile. But when the pitcher made a mistake, Raleigh often crushed it. That in-zone contact rate is the big concern. Out of 187 qualified hitters so far, only Jose Caballero has a worse in-zone contact rate than Raleigh (and Rodriguez is 181st).
Game 8/PA No. 3: Raleigh flies out to left field against the Los Angeles Angels left-hander Reid Detmers on a 2-2 fastball up and in, a perfectly located four-seamer. Here’s the amazing thing: With an exit velocity of 100.7 mph, it was the first hard-hit ball (a ball of 95-plus mph) of the season for Raleigh … in his 28th at-bat.
Game 9/PA No. 1: Facing Angels starter Jack Kochanowicz, Raleigh hit a fly ball to the wall in right field at Angel Stadium… and Jo Adell robbed him of a home run (one of three he would rob in the game).
Last year, maybe that ball travels an extra three feet. If this game is in June, it’s probably a home run. Indeed, it hasn’t helped that the Mariners played their first seven games in Seattle — and Seattle in April is about the toughest place to hit in the majors. They played two night games in Anaheim, another tough place to hit. They played three games in Texas, where Globe Life Field played as the best pitcher’s park in the majors last year.
Game 9/PA No. 3: Facing Kochanowicz for a third time, Raleigh falls behind on a questionable checked-swing strike on the first pitch, and then fouls off four pitches, including two four-seamers (one up, one low and in). He finally strikes out on a 96-mph 3-2 four-seamer way up and out of the zone, a pitch with a 0% strike probability and the kind of pitch a batter in a deep slump offers at.
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Game 11/PA No. 1: Texas righty Jacob deGrom tries to sneak a 3-2 fastball past Raleigh in the first inning, but the pitch is dead center in the strike zone and Raleigh crushes it to right field for his first home run. Raleigh has seven hits in 2026: This is the only one classified as a hard-hit ball.
Game 12/PA No. 2: Raleigh swings at a first-pitch cutter from Nathan Eovaldi, a pitch left out over plate, but Raleigh is late and pops up to shallow left field. He’ll swing at Eovaldi’s first pitch in his next at-bat as well, hitting a foul ball before eventually hitting a bloop single.
Jumping on the first pitch was something that worked last year for Raleigh. He hit .427 with 17 home runs in 82 at-bats when putting the first pitch in play. He was also one of the most aggressive swingers on the first pitch, with the 13th-highest first-pitch swing percentage among qualified hitters. (In another similarity, Harper had the second-highest percentage.)
This year? Raleigh is just 1-for-7 when putting the first pitch in play.
Game 13/PA No. 4: Raleigh flies out on a 3-2 cutter from Cole Winn, perfectly located on the high outside corner. The good sign for Raleigh: This ball was hit at 92 mph and he had two other outs earlier in the game that were hard-hit outs. Maybe it’s starting to connect.
What this season start means for the Mariners
It’s remarkable to see a team’s best hitters all struggling like this at the same time. And to be clear: This is not a case of bad luck on balls in play or anything like that. They’ve been bad. Watching Raleigh’s 55 plate appearances was like watching an overmatched kid just called up from Single-A. Raleigh’s swing-and-miss rate against four-seamers and two-seamers is up from 25.2% last season to 50%. If you can’t hit a fastball, you have no chance at the plate. Rodriguez has similarly been missing fastballs, with a miss rate of 32.8% compared to 21.6% last year.
And when they have made contact? It hasn’t been hard contact. Check out these numbers on hard-hit rates through Seattle’s first 13 games compared to last season:
Mariners in 2025: 42.8% (4th in MLB)Mariners in 2026: 34.2% (29th in MLB)
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Raleigh in 2025: 49.6%Raleigh in 2026: 21.4%
Rodriguez in 2025: 48.0%Rodriguez in 2026: 36.4%
Naylor in 2025: 41.9%Naylor in 2026: 35.0%
Arozarena in 2025: 50.6%Arozarena in 2026: 44.1%
Even in hitting 60 home runs last year, Raleigh was a streaky hitter — and even started slowly, hitting .184 with two home runs through his first 13 games. He had other stretches of one home run in 11 games, one in 10 games and three different stretches of one in nine games. When he hit home runs, they came in bunches, including an incredible 11 two-homer games.
Rodriguez, meanwhile, has been a notorious slow starter throughout his career, with a career first-half OPS of .726 and second-half OPS of .902. His career OPS in August is 300 points higher than it is in April.
None of this alleviates the ugly start but is perhaps evidence that it’s too early to panic. Then again, for a franchise that missed the playoffs by one win in both 2023 and 2024, this slow start might prove costly come September.
