Will the Big Dumper make the Derby his next big moment?

AROUND NOON EVERY day, Caleb John Raleigh -- Cal to most, "Big Dumper" to those who prefer to pay homage to his profound posterior, and the best catcher in the world to everyone -- goes to work. The vast majority of baseball players pull up to the stadium between 3 and 4 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game. Raleigh would never. He needs the extra time to study the tendencies of opposing hitters, formulate a game plan for that night's starting pitcher, nurse the incessant ailments inherent to his position in the training room, stay strong in the weight room, hone his left- and right-handed swings in the batting cage and set an example for the rest of the Seattle Mariners. For hours every day, Raleigh consumes baseball because baseball consumes him.

"I really love the game of baseball. I really do," he said. "I love the scouting reports. I love catching. I love running the game. I love hitting, obviously. It's a game that you can love so much -- and at the same time, when things go wrong, it can be one of the worst things in the world. That's kind of what makes it so great, right?"

It's July 5, the day after Raleigh celebrated another home run with fireworks with some teammates in South Lake Union, a mile from the Space Needle and 3 miles from T-Mobile Park, where Raleigh has spent 2025 doing things never done by a catcher in 150 years of major league baseball. Raleigh's numbers heading into this week's All-Star break elucidate the magnitude of his achievements -- 38 home runs, 1.022 OPS, 81 RBIs, all in just 92 games -- but it's the names he's chasing that give them gravitas. With 66 games left this season, Raleigh is threatening to break Mickey Mantle's single-season home run record for a switch-hitter (54) and Ken Griffey Jr.'s single-season home run record for a Mariner (56). He fell one shy of Barry Bonds' record for first-half home runs (39).

"At the beginning of the year, it was like, all right, he is off to a great start," said Bryan Woo, the Mariners' All-Star right-hander and Raleigh's roommate last year. "And then he just kept going and it was like, wow, this is pretty cool. And then it was like, holy s---, he's going off. And now it's kind of just like, what is going on? Over the last month, I feel like everybody realized it's a historic season. It's not just a really good one or one of the best in the league -- it's something that's never been done. At this point, most guys are just kind of looking at each other every time he hits a homer or has a really good game. We don't really know what to make of it. We're kind of just as dumbfounded as all the fans are."

Raleigh's emergence as a legitimate threat to what once looked like a runaway American League MVP campaign by New York Yankees star Aaron Judge has thrust Seattle's secret -- a switch-hitting, upper deck-hunting, Platinum Glove-winning, every day-playing, badonkadonk-jiggling folk hero -- into the national spotlight. The latest turn comes Monday night in Atlanta at 8 p.m., when the 28-year-old Raleigh will try to become the first switch-hitter and the first catcher to win the Home Run Derby.

Todd Raleigh, his father and a longtime college coach, will throw the pitches Raleigh intends to send over the fence. Squatting behind the plate will be his 15-year-old brother, Todd Jr., privy to the best view at Truist Park. That this moment turned into a Raleigh family affair is poetic. If not for his father -- for the long legacy of Raleighs in baseball forged in the unlikeliest of places -- the Big Dumper wouldn't be here.

LONG BEFORE HE showed up at T-Mobile Park at noon, Cal Raleigh took a yellow school bus to get his daily baseball fix. He would leave Cullowee Valley Elementary at 3:10 p.m., ride about a mile to Hennon Stadium, change into a Western Carolina University uniform and watch his dad work.

Todd Raleigh grew up in Swanton, Vermont, where his family was baseball royalty. His oldest brother, John, won two state titles at Missisquoi Valley Union High before dying a year after graduation of lymphoma. The middle Raleigh brother, Matt, captured three state championships and twice hit more than 30 home runs in a minor league season, topping out at Triple-A. With a pair of state championships on his résumé, Todd wanted to go to Western Carolina, so he hitchhiked down the East Coast, made the team and thrived. When he returned as a coach, he found a new home.

In his firstborn, Todd found a kindred spirit. Raleigh's love of baseball manifested itself relentlessly. At the grocery store, he pantomimed swings in the aisles. At home, he emulated the stances of every Catamounts player. When he was home sick, Raleigh would draw diagrams of uniforms. He gave lineup suggestions to Todd. In a home video taken when he was 8 years old, Raleigh sang: "I'm the Home Run Derby champ. I'm the Home Run Derby champ."

Before Raleigh entered fifth grade, Todd's success at Western Carolina earned him the head coaching job at the University of Tennessee, one of the country's premier college programs. In Knoxville, Raleigh encountered the first challenges to his love of the game. He got cut from his middle-school team. Todd, who had recruited Mookie Betts to play for the Volunteers only to see him sign with the Boston Red Sox out of high school, got fired after four seasons. At Knoxville Catholic, a coach told Raleigh he was a Division III talent. As he fumed, Todd offered him some advice: "Get so much better that you can't be told no." The family returned to North Carolina, and Raleigh broke out at Smoky Mountain High. He went to Florida State and was named a freshman All-American. Following a sophomore slump, he thrived as a junior, hitting 13 home runs and walking more than he struck out. Scouts loved his power from both sides of the plate but worried that at 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds, he wasn't athletic enough to remain at catcher and recommended a move to first base.

Raleigh refused. Their eyes were the issue, not his skills. Six catchers went ahead of him in the 2018 draft. Seattle plucked Raleigh with the 90th pick in the draft, hopeful a third-rounder could evolve into a big leaguer. When Raleigh arrived at Low-A Everett that year, Tony Arnerich, the Mariners' field coordinator and catching instructor, watched one session of him catching and admitted to being surprised.

"You're nothing like what I expected, what everybody said you were," Arnerich said.

"Well, what did they say?" Raleigh responded.

They said the sorts of things Raleigh had already spent years repurposing into motivation. He'd been told he wasn't good enough in sixth grade. Or high school. Or college. He was a switch-hitter who, despite almost even splits against right- and left-handed pitching, was advised to pick one side to hit from, because if he were intent on catching, the job was too demanding to bifurcate time spent on swinging. Even after Raleigh thrived in his debut season in Seattle's farm system, hit 29 home runs in his second year and outhit everyone at the team's minor league alternate site in 2020, he never came close to a top 100 prospect list. In an organization with Julio Rodriguez and Logan Gilbert and George Kirby and Jarred Kelenic hoarding all the attention, Raleigh always registered as an afterthought.

Raleigh joined Gilbert and Kelenic on Seattle's big league roster in July 2021, with Kelenic introducing to the masses the nickname he had given Raleigh in the minor leagues. The Big Dumper was a big disappointment, unable to muster even a .200 batting average. The 2022 season was worse. Following an April of inconsistent playing time, batting .083/.214/.208, Raleigh was shipped back to AAA.

"I wasn't sure that he was going to stick around," Gilbert said, "much less turn into what he is today."

Raleigh wasn't sure, either. Growing up, he had heard his father talk about the major leagues with reverence. There was Low-A, High-A, Double-A and Triple-A. The big leagues, Todd said, were Eight-A, exponentially harder than the minors, and they had humbled Raleigh to the point of sulking, something Todd refused to oblige.

"I was just angry at the world," Raleigh said. "I was mad, I was upset, I wasn't playing as much as I would've liked, I wasn't playing well. A lot of complaining. He sat me down and was like, 'Hey, you don't realize how lucky you are to be where you're at. You know, this is what you dreamed of your whole life, and you're sitting here complaining about it, and you're not doing anything about it.' And it really changed my perspective on a lot of things. I started looking at things through a different lens. It was something I needed that I didn't know I needed."

The Mariners gave Raleigh a 48-hour window to report to Triple-A Tacoma. He showed up a day early, batted third in the lineup, went 0-for-4, called Todd and said: "I'm never going back down again." Raleigh needed to work on his ability to compartmentalize, Todd told him, not just separating his duties as a catcher from those as a hitter but his bad days from the chaos they sowed in his mind.

"Cal is a processor," Todd said. "It takes him a couple days to consider something and understand it. Eventually, he comes around."

Raleigh saw the wisdom in Todd's advice. He needed to clear his head, so he took walks in the morning, sometimes seeking refuge in nearby churches. He found the swings that had disappeared. He shed the malaise, ditched the attitude and poured his energy into the work -- the early arrivals, the meticulous preparation, the game within the game. Barely a week after Raleigh's demotion, Mariners catcher Tom Murphy separated his left shoulder, prompting Seattle to recall the debugged version of Raleigh.

After five hitless games that collapsed his batting average to .065, Raleigh hunted a fastball from New York Mets reliever Drew Smith and parked it 435 feet onto the right-field concourse at Citi Field, a titanic shot that reminded him of his capabilities. Raleigh homered again three days later. And again five days after that. He went deep six more times in June and was a menace behind the plate, on his way to throwing out an AL-best 25 attempted base stealers.

"I don't care how touted you are," Todd said. "If there's a crack in your character, a crack in your work ethic, a physical flaw, you're going to get exposed."

Raleigh was the one doing the exposing. With Murphy out for the season, he assumed full-time catching duties and racked up 25 home runs as Seattle surged toward its first postseason berth in 21 years, the longest drought in major North American men's professional sports. Out of the lineup on Sept. 30, 2022, a day after catching all 188 pitches of an 11-inning game, he entered in the ninth inning as a pinch hitter.

The game was tied 1-1, with a win needed to seal the Mariners' spot in the postseason. Raleigh worked the count against Oakland right-hander Domingo Acevedo full and fouled off the sixth pitch of the at-bat. Fans around the stadium stood, hoping to conjure the halcyon days of Griffey and Edgar Martinez and Randy Johnson, the three Hall of Famers who brought aura to Seattle baseball but never a World Series appearance. Acevedo left a slider over the plate, low and inside. Raleigh loosed his bat. The ball surged into the night, ricocheted off a window of the Hit It Here Café in right field and, for an instant, at least, nearly a half-century of Mariners failures vanished. Of all the consequential hits in Mariners history -- Ichiro Suzuki breaking Rogers Hornsby's single-season hit record, Martinez's double that scored Griffey from first in the 1995 division series against the Yankees -- none landed with the euphoric release of Raleigh's walk-off. It was a bloodletting and a portent.

Raleigh wasn't just a part of the Mariners' future; he was a foundational element. He played in 145 games the next year -- second most in the league -- and hit 30 home runs. Last year, he bumped his homer total to 34 and logged 153 games, a rarely seen figure for a catcher made even more impressive by his predilection to play through injuries. When he hit the walk-off in 2022, Raleigh was playing with a broken left thumb that had a torn ligament. Gilbert saw him play through a burst blood vessel in his eye and an ear gushing blood after getting struck on a backswing.

"That's what really does it for me," Gilbert said. "Love the homers, love how you play, all that kind of stuff. When you're banged up and you don't say a word and go out there, I'm like, 'OK, this guy's a gamer.' Every game he's back there, he takes a foul ball. Like, 'Oh, that one looked bad. OK, it's been like 20 seconds -- maybe he's milking it.' You forget about it. And then you go in the training room and there's a huge black-and-purple spot on his thigh or wherever it is, and you're like, 'OK, he was actually pretending nothing happened, not milking it.' I wouldn't be able to walk."

Putting Humpty Dumper back together again takes treatment of all manner and variety. Ice, heat, massage, stimulation. One night, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander walked into the training room to see acupuncture needles all over Raleigh's body, as if he were trying to cosplay Pinhead.

"And the next morning," Hollander said, "there's one person there before everyone, sitting in the cafeteria with a stack of advance papers: Cal."

In the work and the triumph it cultivated, Raleigh had validated his promise never to return to Triple-A. He didn't just belong. He embodied the big in big leagues. He was turning into something new -- more self-assured, more capable, the sort of character onto whom Seattle could latch with no reservation.

IN SEATTLE'S OPENING series this year, a between-innings video with Cal Raleigh's deadpan face flashed on the scoreboard. From commercials to vignettes to promotions, no team in baseball does entertainment with as much creative flair as the Mariners. Even for them this pushed the envelope of absurdity. The premise was simple: Send an email to bigdumper@mariners.com, and Raleigh will help you dump a problematic person in your life.

"Tom, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it's not working with Lindsay," Raleigh said. "Don't worry, though. When one door closes, another one opens. Specifically, a door to a new apartment, because your current lease is in Lindsay's name. Bummer."

Even if it was a bit -- the Mariners have received real requests at the email address for boyfriends, girlfriends, friends and others, although not one of them was from Lindsay -- it illustrated the full commodification of the Big Dumper persona by the Mariners and the full embrace of it by Raleigh. Baseball had seen the Big Train (Walter Johnson), the Big Hurt (Frank Thomas), the Big Unit (Randy Johnson) and dozens more Bigs. Never had one been assigned on account of thiccness alone.

"It's not the one you write up in your mind when you're thinking of nicknames," Raleigh said. "But, I mean ... it's true. That's who I am."

Raleigh's was the posterior that kept on giving, offering an endless supply of promotions that helped burrow him into the psyche of a wounded fan base. Instead of "RALEIGH" running across the nameplate of replica jerseys, the Mariners sell a No. 29 jersey that says "BIG DUMPER." They made Big Dumper onesies and sold out almost immediately. He filmed a commercial for Big Dumper Trucking, a company that does not exist.

"Part of what makes Cal so lovable is he's an everyman," said Jerry Dipoto, the Mariners' president of baseball operations. "He's blue collar. Shows up in his truck. Does his job. That's the beauty of him. He's not flashy. He's not boisterous. He's not there to create his own brand. He's been almost embarrassed by all the attention he's received."

Connecting with Seattle mattered to Raleigh. Last year, he meandered outside of T-Mobile to a stage where fans were getting their heads shaved by Jay Buhner, the slugging outfielder of the team's 1990s glory days. For 30 years, Buhner Buzz Cut night entitled people willing to sport Buhner's signature chrome-dome look to a T-shirt and free ticket to a Mariners game. Off came Raleigh's locks, courtesy of Buhner.

The Mariners sold a Cal-Zone calzone at concession stands and replaced it this year with Lil' Dumpers soup dumplings. They take advantage of Raleigh's sense of humor (a video of him and Gilbert asking each other questions when hooked up to a polygraph is laced with laugh-out-loud moments) and his trust in them (they once convinced Raleigh that a slow-motion camera was broken, so he needed to move -- and yell -- in slow motion). They renamed right field the Dump Yard for a night. "We thought about calling the people sitting in the section the Dumplings," said Gregg Greene, the Mariners' longtime marketing guru, "but we realized that's probably not a great name for our fans."

By the time All-Star voting commenced this year, the Mariners urged fans to "Be a Peach, Vote Cal," using a fruit emoji to secure votes. At one point, they put together an all-booty-song walk-up playlist, including "Baby Got Back" by Seattle native Sir Mix-A-Lot for Raleigh. He finished with the second-most votes in the AL behind Judge.

When he walks around Seattle and gets recognized, fans typically don't yell his name. It's almost always "Dumper." And as advantageous as an ample derriere can be for baseball players -- the lower half of a swing generates power, not the upper half -- its drawbacks occasionally reveal themselves. On the night of the ceremony in which Raleigh won the Seattle Sports Commission's men's Sports Star of the Year award in late February, the fly on his suit pants got stuck. He asked the front desk of the hotel in which he was staying for safety pins. They didn't help. A nearby Men's Wearhouse agreed to stay open late to accommodate Raleigh. Finding a pair of off-the-rack pants that fit was a lost cause. Eventually, he settled on a pair of jeans and apologized to the crowd at the event for his lack of formal attire due to "a zipper incident."

They laughed, and they cheered, and they reminded Raleigh why he had been open to signing a long-term contract with the franchise. The Mariners had approached Raleigh in the 2023-24 offseason about a deal. He demurred. At the winter meetings in December 2024, Dipoto and Hollander broached the topic again and were told to table it until spring training. The team sent a proposal early in the spring. Before he considered it, Raleigh said, he needed to learn more about the future of the franchise.

The Mariners have arguably the best farm system in baseball, but they consistently rank in the middle of the pack in money spent on players, never carrying a payroll that exceeds $158 million into the season. Following a spring training workout, Raleigh -- still in full uniform -- met Dipoto and Hollander in a suite at the team's Arizona facility. He wanted to understand more about the Mariners' future: the minor leaguers, the front office's philosophies, how the competition in the AL West projects. He carried a notebook filled with questions and started firing away.

What are prospects' timelines? How is the roster evolving? Are Gilbert and Kirby and Woo and right-handers Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller going to be on this team as free agency approaches? Or will the team trade them to start the cycle that has kept Tampa Bay and Milwaukee consistently in the playoff mix? Because, Raleigh said, if this group stays together, it can win a World Series. They spoke for 2½ hours, and the answers were clearly satisfactory, because soon thereafter Raleigh agreed to a six-year, $105 million context extension that can keep him in a Mariners uniform through 2031.

"Cal wants to win," Dipoto said. "He wants to eat your face off. He's an intense competitor. Cal says a lot without saying much."

WHAT RALEIGH WILL say is that all of this happened for a reason. Getting cut and being told what he can't be and struggling and hearing the hard truth from his father led him to the point where he can find the best version of himself -- where Cal Raleigh steps into a Mariners uniform, like Clark Kent in a phone booth, and becomes the Big Dumper, punisher of baseballs. It's freeing, really, allowing him to look beyond today and toward goals bigger than him.

"Now that I've kind of established myself in the league and learned I can be an everyday catcher, I can hit, I can call a game, I can do all these things, you start turning your attention to: All right, now I want to win a World Series," Raleigh said. "I got my contract. Now I really want to deliver for these fans, for my family, for myself to prove that I can do this. That's what drives me and consumes me."

As gratifying as individual achievements can be, Raleigh is wholly unconcerned with how he stacks up to Judge in the MVP race. He acknowledged that being on the field for the Home Run Derby with his father and brother is more important to him than winning it. He finds more fulfillment in group success, starting with this Mariners team, which at times looks like it can win a championship and at others like another disappointment.

Raleigh is determined to do his part to avoid the fates of the 2023 and 2024 Mariners teams. His defense is still elite, from arm to blocking to framing. The bat is calibrated toward his strengths, with the second-highest fly ball rate of any hitter in the pitch-tracking era (57.1%) and a pull rate that ranks 25th out of the 3,500-plus qualified seasons, according to FanGraphs. The durability is unparalleled: only two days off in the first half. And the leadership, long a work in progress, is coming into its own: Raleigh now wields the microphone on the team plane and bus, a role given to the steward of each team.

Sometimes it gets awkward, Raleigh's inherent sheepishness exposing itself. When he was named an All-Star starter, the first thing he did was apologize to the team for the hullabaloo around him. "It's not the same anymore," Raleigh said, and he's right. Hit 38 home runs in the first half and it's not going to be. He said the same to Todd recently, and his father responded in his inimitable fashion.

"I said, 'Well, wah, wah, wah. This is a privilege, right? Do you want to not be in there? I'll trade with you. How's that?'" Todd said. "He gets it. You just gotta learn to deal with it."

So he learns. And he grows. And he shows up at noon, always ready to put in a good day's work, loving every last moment.