Cal Raleigh Drops Historic Bomb No. 40, Mariners Best Angels 7-2
ANAHEIM, Calif. – It’s been a while, but the Seattle Mariners had what could be considered a good, solid win. 7-2 was the final tally in California and the team picked up a game on the Astros while keeping distance with the Rangers in the playoff chase.
The biggest story of the day was Cal Raleigh connecting on his 40th home run of the season, becoming the first player to reach that mark in 2025 – and he did it before August rolled around, the first time a switch hitter had achieved the feat before the end of July. The M’s had two other solo shots for some early offense but the big insurance came from runs put together in the field in the sixth and seventh innings.
George Kirby put a lot of elbow grease into his winning performance on the bump in the Saturday night ballgame, pushing and shoving his way through jam after jam, inning after inning for the first two thirds of the contest.
Solo Shots Supply Early Runs
The Mariners again struggled at hitting with runners in scoring position during the first few innings on Saturday. The first inning showed some interesting promise against former Mariner Tyler Anderson, with two one-out singles from Julio Rodriguez and then Cal Raleigh, but Anderson got two quick outs from Randy Arozarena and Josh Naylor.
Luckily, the trusty home run ball came through to plate a couple early runs. Of course, it started with Rodriguez.
This might be the hot streak we were looking for from the young star. He has now hit four home runs in three games and is 6-13 with four RBIs. The M’s have gotten pretty unlucky that they’re all solo shots. That makes sense, though, with Crawford currently struggling.
Rodriguez’ home run came on the classic hitter’s pitch: a 3-1 cutter that didn’t cut right down the pipe from Anderson. Seattle’s center fielder teed off and crushed it onto the base of the rockpile in Angel Stadium.
Randy Arozarena joined the parade in the fourth. Anderson got ahead in a 1-2 count but tried to blow a fastball over the top of Arozarena’s bat – and he didn’t miss it. The ball flew out to center field, drifting over to the right just a little bit as it soared over the wall and the scoreboard into the seats. Seattle led 2-1 after Arozarena’s 20th of the season.
The M’s had an opportunity to expand the lead soon after, as Naylor cracked a single into right center and promptly stole second. But once again, the Mariners bats fell silent once the runner reached second with three quick outs from Polanco, Mitch Garver, and Dominic Canzone.
40. Count ‘Em. 40.
It’s been noted that Raleigh has entered the second half with something of a slump. Over his first seven games since the All-Star Break, Raleigh had a .207/.258/.310 slash with just one homer and two RBIs.
There’s worry about the Home Run Derby messing with his swing, there’s concern over natural regression to the mean. He has been striking out looking a fair bit recently on some 3-2 counts, which potentially indicates a bit of a lack of confidence in his ability to foul a close pitch off.
I don’t know if there will be any lack of confidence after his latest home run swing, however. It came in the sixth inning, leading off against righty reliever José Fermin, who threw a 2-0 fastball on the lower inside part of the middle of the plate. Anyone who has watched Raleigh knows that is exactly his sweet spot when he’s hitting from the left side.
Let’s just say the ball is still rising. I don’t know if it has landed yet. When it does, it will probably be somewhere in the Inland Empire. Riverside, maybe. It exited the bat at 113.5 miles an hour with a fierce firecracker pop that let everyone in a 10 mile radius know a home run had just been struck.
Raleigh is just the seventh primary catcher – though he played Saturday as a DH – in MLB history to hit 40 or more home runs in a season and his 2025 is the ninth catching season with 40+ home runs, joining 1953 Roy Campanella, 1970 and 1972 Johnny Bench, 1996 Todd Hundley, 1997 and 1999 Mike Piazza, 2003 Javy Lopez, and 2021 Salvador Perez.
The MLB home run leader was characteristically humble about it after the game, but did comment about how he will remember the moment.
“I mean, in the grand scheme of things it’s not much right now,” Raleigh said. “It’s a cool milestone to hit, and I’m very thankful for it. Cool moment for sure.”
Bizarre Sixth Inning Sequence Buried by M’s Rally
Home plate umpire Doug Eddings was the center of an intriguing series of events in the top of the sixth. After Arozarena followed up Raleigh’s homer with a walk, he attempted a steal of second base. Eddings immediately started yelling as the pitch was thrown and directed Arozarena back to first. Eddings went out to talk with Fermin.
Evidently, what had been happening was that Fermin had been going into the set on the mound before the batter Naylor had readied himself in the box. Eddings ruled that the pitch was effectively null.
This confused basically everyone. Dan Wilson chirped at Eddings a bit, likely asking why there was no balk call. A brief calm passed before Wilson stepped out of the dugout and started heatedly discussing the matter with Eddings. I was very surprised Eddings didn’t toss Wilson out of the game; my guess is that despite his obvious heatedness, he kept behind a line of respect and discussed the play itself.
It ended up not mattering in the slightest. Arozarena swiped second on a later pitch and Naylor walked anyway, followed by Polanco walking as well to load the bases with nobody out. Garver popped out, bringing the series RISP number to 0-18.
That dam finally broke with Dominic Canzone, who took a changeup about a foot off the plate and plunked a grounder into center field. Arozarena and Naylor scored while Polanco got to third. The final run of the inning came off a weak grounder from Crawford to Luis Rengifo at second. In a mental mistake, the Angels second baseman opted not to tag Canzone right in front of him but instead dropped the ball trying to throw to first.
Kirby Dances with Fire in Quality Start
Kirby technically had a quality start in Saturday’s game, but boy did he have to work for it. The Angels had traffic on the bases in four of his six innings and got a runner into scoring position in three of those frames as the Mariners starter struggled to throw first-pitch strikes, reaching his career high in walks with three and hitting a batter to boot.
But Kirby did something almost as admirable as preventing baserunners: stranding baserunners. He did this on the back of nine strikeouts in the game, many of which came at key high-leverage points.
In the second, Kirby dropped a fastball right down the middle on the first pitch to Taylor Ward, who promptly walloped it over the center field fence for the game’s first run. Jo Adell faced pitches either in the middle of the zone or off the plate for most of his 10-pitch plate appearance and walked, but Kirby worked through the rest of the inning with some defensive help from Rodriguez.
Kirby worked through two two-out walks in the third and won a grueling 10-pitch battle with Taylor Ward in the bottom of the fourth after going down with three opening balls away. That particular at-bat showed great resilience from Kirby, as Ward was able to sit inside and foul off pitches on the corner due to Kirby’s early outside misses.
The Halos managed their second run off Kirby in the fifth. Two singles and a stolen base to lead off the inning put runners on second and third with nobody out. Kirby punched out Wade to get one away.
But his next pitch was a slider right down the pipe to Zach Neto. It’s a game of inches, they say, and it was inches that turned a potential 4-2 Halo lead into a tie game. Neto teed off on the ball but got under it by two hairs and some air. Rodriguez drifted back to the warning track but slowed down, tracking the ball above him into his glove. O’Hoppe easily tagged and scored, but it was a crucial second out. Trout grounded out to end the fifth with a tied game.
The biggest jam Kirby faced was in the bottom of the sixth. Schanuel knocked a grooved curve onto the outfield grass, and two batters later, Adell jumped on a slider on the lower edge. Moncada was hit by a pitch and so the bags were juiced for the Halos in the last of the sixth.
O’Hoppe was the tying run at the plate. Kirby attacked him with sinkers at the bottom of the zone before blowing him down with a top-of-the-zone heater. Rengifo faced a mix of breaking balls low and fastballs high, but was able to lay off the high heat and work a 3-2 count.
But on the eighth pitch of Rengifo’s at-bat, Kirby fired a slider two inches below the zone. Rengifo swung well over the top of it and struck out to end the inning without a single run across for Los Angeles. It was Kirby’s career-high 106th pitch of his start.
“I definitely made it a little more stressful than I wanted to,” Kirby remarked after the game. “Really happy I was able to bear down some of those scoring opportunities. I had my best stuff there at the end.”
Back-End Relievers Lock it Down
The heavy-hitters in the Mariner bullpen such as Andrés Muñoz, Matt Brash, and Eduard Bazardo were completely gassed after Friday’s extra-innings battle, so the M’s had to rely on the second tier of their relievers. Luckily, Kirby was able to power through six and the team finally added some insurance to a previously-close ballgame, so the pressure was largely off.
Trent Thornton tossed two scoreless in the seventh and eighth, getting through some minor trouble of his own in the second frame with the help of a double play ball.
Meanwhile, the bats tacked on another run in the top of the eighth. Polanco cracked a leadoff single and made it to second on a wild pitch a little later. After two quick outs, Ben Williamson scorched a grounder up the middle for the RBI single. Williamson has been hitting the ball with more authority as of late, and this was another good example, coming off the bat at 102 miles an hour.
Carlos Vargas worked an easy ninth inning to end the game with a 7-2 score.
On Deck
With this win, the Mariners improved to 56-49. The fourth and final game of the series in Anaheim is on Sunday afternoon, after which the M’s will head halfway up the state to Sacramento to face the Athletics for three games. The next homestand begins on Thursday with a four-game series against the Texas Rangers.
The Texas series will be a big one. The Rangers have won four games in a row and are just a game back of the Mariners in the wild card chase while being a half game back of the Red Sox in the third wild card spot.
Half a game ahead of the Mariners in the first wild card spot stand the struggling New York Yankees, currently on their third straight loss. But perhaps more exciting for Seattle is that in the AL West, the M’s trail the Astros – now at risk of getting swept by the A’s – by just four games.
