The baseball that’s just left Angel Civilli’s right hand is destined to land in the right field seats for Cal Raleigh’s unprecedented (for a catcher) 60th bomb of the year . . .

He still has the worst nickname in baseball, so far as I’m concerned. But if that’s the only terrible thing about Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, I can live with it.

Sort of. A guy who goes where no catcher has gone before deserves better than the Big Dumper. Sorry.

With one swing in the bottom of the eighth Wednesday, in an interleague game against the National League West’s Colorado bottom-crawlers, Raleigh did more than just stamp the Mariners’s first American League West crown since 2001.

You thought it was freaky enough that Raleigh hit a 50th regular-season bomb? (Against the Padres, 25 August.) You thought it was surreal that a catcher met and passed Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle as the most home run-prolific switch hitter ever in a single season? Now he’s the only catcher ever to hit 60 or more homers in a season.

So far as the American League is concerned, when Raleigh swung on Angel Civilli’s first two-out service and sent it on a Roger Maris-like high liner into the right field seats, he also yanked away whatever exclusivity the Yankees might have claimed on 60+ home run season bombardiers.

Relax, American League teams not based in the south Bronx. You are now free to unearth your own prospective 60-homer season hitters without the slightest chance of any Yankee or Yankee fan presenting you with a cease-and-desist order attached to ownership papers. Isn’t it just delicious to feel as though someone a transcontinental distance away poached a Yankee claim?

The Mariners didn’t even exist in Maris’s and Babe Ruth’s times. When Aaron Judge passed Maris as the AL’s all-time single-season bombardier, in 2022, the Mariners were a) 36 years old as a major league franchise, and b) second-place AL West finishers behind the eventual World Series-winning Astros. Add first expansion franchise player in Show history to hit 60 or more bombs in a season.

How far past Judge could Raleigh go? Number 60 was the second homer of the evening Wednesday; Raleigh started the Mariners en route their 9-2 romp with a one-out first inning blast on Rockies starter Tanner Gordon’s dollar. That was the first of three solo bombs the Mariners detonated in the inning; Julio Rodríguez followed Raleigh with a shot, then Jorge Polanco launched one an out later.

The Mariners have one more to play against the Rocks today. They get to finish the regular season against the ogres of the National League West this weekend. The idea of this set proving a potential prelude to the World Series may not be terribly unrealistic, even if the Dodgers are extremely old hands at postseason play. (This will be their thirteenth straight postseason trip, on their twelfth NL West title in thirteen years.)

And the guy who’s had a huge hand in getting the Mariners there, whether helping his pitchers hold down a respectable 3.97 ERA when they throw to him or making longtimers forget other catchers for a few moments (Yogi whom? Johnny what? Ivan where? Mike how?), doesn’t think he’s doing anything all that remarkable.

“I mean, I just try to be the best I can be,” Raleigh tells reporters one moment. “Catchers usually are pretty tired at this point in the year, but you could say the same thing for everybody,” he says the next.

Horseshit, say his peers and elders who know that playing 120 major league baseball games behind the plate, as Raleigh’s done this season so far, isn’t exactly the healthiest or the least taxing job on the field.

“It’s pretty incredible what he’s done,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy, himself a former major league catcher, tells The Athletic. “He’s a workhorse. It’s kind of an old-school thing. You look at Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk and those guys. I’m sure he’s been beat up at times, too. Foul tips and things that go with catching every day. And to be able to do what he’s doing, it’s really incredible.”

“It’s the mystery bruise game,” says Guardians manager Stephen Vogt, also a former catcher. “You wake up and you can’t remember where it came from. Your legs are jello. Your body just aches. It hurts.”

“Once you catch every day and you get about 30-40 under your belt, your body becomes kind of numb,” says Tigers catcher Jake Rogers. “You get really tired, but you don’t really feel like it. You feel like you can go forever. You get in the routine of things and you’re like, ‘OK, this is not that bad.’ And then at the end of the year, you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I’m the most tired I’ve ever been in my entire life’.”

Bochy never hit more than eight homers in any of his nine major league seasons. Vogt hit a sentimentally memorable home run in his final major league plate appearance, during a return engagement with the Athletics, but his season high was eighteen. Rogers hit 21 in 2023 but ten the following year and only three this year in a season disrupted by a left oblique injury.

“Every inning you catch is making you a worse hitter,” says Guardians backstop Austin Hedges, whose career high was also eighteen in 2017.

You don’t have your legs. You’re thinking a lot. You’re mentally exhausted. There are so many things that are taking away how hard hitting is, or at least challenging that. And for him to go out and play literally every single day and his off-days are DH days—he doesn’t get a day to just stop thinking about game-calling—it’s really, really special. For me, he’s MVP.

For him, but possibly not for everyone who votes on the award. Raleigh has to overcome Judge, who leads the American League in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, total bases, runs created, and win probability added. If this self-effacing young man allows himself to think of winning the AL’s MVP this year, he’d have to pray that MVP voters take his über-demanding field position into heavy account.

My Real Batting Average metric—total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches / total plate appearances—doesn’t help Raleigh against Judge in and of itself, either:

But Raleigh accomplished what some people thought even the most powerful catchers could never fathom.

There were those who claimed Negro Leagues legend Josh Gibson either might have done it or did done it, the verifiable records being shamefully incomplete but the eyewitness accounts making plausible. The best hitters among the pre-integration/pre-World War II Show catchers—Mickey Cochrane, Gabby Hartnett, Ernie Lombardi—didn’t get near it. Neither did the best of the postwar/post-integration/night-ball era backstops, Berra, Bench, Carter, Fisk, Rodríguez, Piazza.

Raleigh’s making aspiring catchers dream the impossible dream.

Ask another Raleigh elder, Kansas City’s redoubtable Salvador Perez, whose own season homer high is 48 in 2021. “I think he’s the MVP of the American League. I have a lot of respect for Aaron Judge and I know he’s a good hitter, too,” Perez says. “but to be a catcher and prepare the game plan, help the pitcher, catch well, throw well and hit fifty-plus homers? Ha!”

That’ll be sixty plus, most likely, before the final regular-season weekend is finished.