Baseball fans may unfortunately be seeing less of Big Dumper this season.
Seattle Mariners star catcher Cal Raleigh received the day off on Monday. Raleigh was out of the lineup for Monday’s series-opening game against the New York Yankees at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Wash.
Speaking with reporters about the decision before the game, Mariners manager Dan Wilson revealed that the team plans to give Raleigh more days off this season.
“It’s a chance for him to get some rest, for sure,” said Wilson of Raleigh, per Adam Jude of The Seattle Times. “Coming out of spring training, he had sort of a shorter spring training in a lot of ways, and [the team] didn’t want to spike his workload too much.”
Raleigh, 29, was a breakout superstar for the Mariners last season. He posted an MLB-leading 60 home runs to go along with an AL-leading 126 RBIs, finishing the year as the runner-up for AL MVP. Raleigh’s 60 homers also set the all-time records for most homers in a season by a catcher and the most homers in a season by a switch-hitter.
Perhaps most remarkably, Raleigh did his damage while playing in 159 of 162 possible regular season games last season (and tacking on 12 more playoff games as well). Jude notes that Raleigh did not get his first day off in 2025 until June 8.
Catcher is also notorious for how physically taxing of a position it is. With Raleigh even playing in the World Baseball Classic earlier this month (and getting into a bizarre beef with a Seattle teammate while there), it is no wonder that the Mariners want to manage his load in the 2026 MLB season.
