00:00Cal Raleigh. Last year's baseball story. My favorite story last year of Major League Baseball.
00:07The Mariners catcher, the big dumper. He was everywhere, right? He was getting endorsement
00:11deals. People were talking about the nickname and where he was in the pantheon of greatest
00:17single season action that we had ever seen from a guy who was a catcher. You just don't see
00:22catchers hitting 60 home runs. It doesn't happen. Cal Raleigh was unbelievable last year. But if
00:29you look at Saquon Barkley and what he did when he ran for 2,000 yards and then the next
00:36year
00:37being nowhere near as productive, it really feels like all those innings and all that time he spent
00:45at the plate last year has come back to bite Cal Raleigh in a big, big way because the Mariners
00:52are 56 and 64. They're out of the postseason at the moment. But the numbers for Cal Raleigh are
00:59absolutely eye-popping when you stop and go, wait, what the heck happened? Last year,
01:05he had one of the greatest offensive years we've ever seen. He had a 948 on-base plus slugging. He
01:13was
01:13fourth in all of baseball. This year, it's 564. 564. He is dead last among 165 hitters that have had
01:26at
01:27least 350 plate appearances here in Major League Baseball. You can make the case that he is the
01:33worst hitter day-to-day, everyday player at the dish in Major League Baseball. He hit 60 home runs last
01:43year. He is on pace to hit 17. He had 125 RBIs last year. He has 43, and it's August
01:53the 12th.
01:55You come in second behind Aaron Judge for the MVP. This guy, you can make a case, shouldn't be playing
02:02baseball right now for the Mariners. He's been so bad. This could go down as the single greatest
02:11collapse year-to-year in Major League Baseball history. Hack Wilson did this where the Cubs
02:22investigated him for what he was doing at late night hours because he was so bad. 95 years ago,
02:34Wilson had just 13 home runs after hitting 56 and winning the MVP the year prior, but even Wilson's
02:42OPS the following year was nearly 800. Cal Raleigh is not going to get to 600 from an OPS perspective.
02:52We don't know if the Mariners are doing some type of negotiation for Cal Raleigh, but they might need
02:59to do some type of negotiation for Cal Raleigh as to what happened to a guy who was one of
03:08the most
03:08feared hitters in the game, and now he is an absolute puppet compared to what he once was.
03:18We're not in the steroid era. The Brady Anderson conversation, if you're my age, we always use the word
03:25Brady. Brady Anderson became the guy that we talked about with the Orioles a lot, or he was the dude
03:30that had a crazy year, hit 50 some odd home runs, and then disappeared and wasn't really part of any
03:37major conversations around home run power hitting ever again. But we're not in the steroid era.
03:44We have the most aggressive steroid testing in Major League Baseball history. We've never had
03:51like this before. We've never had players be tested as regularly that the overall system is robust
03:59to catch those who are using any type of PED in Major League Baseball. So he was tested a ton
04:07last
04:08year. I don't know what he's being tested at all if this year, but why would you test him this
04:11year?
04:12He's going to hit 17 home runs, maybe. It's hard to imagine how many injuries he played
04:20through last year. It's hard to imagine how many different shots he was taking or what he did to
04:27play last year, because he may have sacrificed the rest of his career to go for one historic run.
04:34And to be honest, I'm not so sure it was a bad move to do it. I mean, Cal Raleigh
04:40was an ascending
04:41player. He had potential.
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