PUYALLUP – The line weaved around the parking lot and spilled out onto the sidewalk along River Road, generations of Seattle Mariners fans gathered here on a hot Saturday morning to catch a glimpse of everyone’s favorite catcher.
One guy from Yakima claimed to have been first in line at 4 a.m., six hours before Cal Raleigh was scheduled to arrive for an endorsement appearance at a car dealership.
Once inside, Raleigh was asked to wear a baseball jersey with “LEGEND” scrawled across the chest in block letters. It fit him well.
For 90 minutes, Raleigh stood and posed for pictures with adoring fans who, as a beleaguered whole, have made a connection with him in a way they have with few players in the Mariners’ five decades of existence.
Seattle is the only city to never experience its team in the World Series, but this fan base has come to believe in Raleigh, and he believes he’s on the verge of helping to deliver for them something to remember this fall.
“You can tell just watching him over there. He’s been up there all morning and he’s still smiling and waving at everyone. He’s just such a good guy,” said Mary Moneypenny, 48, a lifelong Mariners fan sitting on the other side of the Legend Auto Sales showroom. “Watching him in the Home Run Derby with his dad and his brother, and you can tell he brings that sense of family to the team. I think the fans get that from him, and that’s why everyone likes him so much.”
It’s been a full-circle embrace.
Seattle has embraced their switch-hitting catcher from small town North Carolina.
Raleigh has embraced the PNW as his new home, the place he wants to spend his entire career.
And everyone, it seems, is embracing this Mariners team’s potential with this catcher leading the charge.
“We’re trying to build something special,” Raleigh said in a recent interview. “We built a quality team the past few years; we just haven’t put it all together. … Nobody said it’s easy, right? You can’t take anything for granted and you have to understand that, as an organization, nothing’s ever guaranteed in this life, you know? We have to bring it every single day. And that’s what I’m trying to do as a player every day.”
Raleigh, 28, has accomplished things this season that no catcher, and no switch-hitter, has done in Major League Baseball history, putting him in the thick of the American League MVP discussion and putting the Mariners in position to win their first division title in nearly a quarter-century.
He hasn’t backed away from the expectations that follow those historic breakthroughs.
“This is not a finished product by any means,” he said. “This is a long-term situation where we’re here to try to win championships and try and do something that we’ve never done here before. It’s having that parade and having those kind of accomplishments at the end of the year that bring the organization and city together. … That’s ultimately where we want to get to. That’s obviously a ways away, but we’re trying to get multiple. That’s the end goal.”
The Mariners have what they believe is their most talented roster in years, one capable of making the sort of postseason push that, as Raleigh suggests, can deepen the emotional connection between a team and its fan base.
In Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez, the Mariners have two bankable superstars in the prime of their careers, both of whom have signed long-term contract extension to stay in Seattle.
They complement each other well.
Ever the showman, Rodríguez is the epitome of cool. He has a natural charm and flashy athleticism that make him as entertaining as anyone in the game today. With Julio, anything seems possible.
With Raleigh, everything seems to get done. He plays the sport’s most demanding position, hits from both sides of the plate and is one of the most respected clubhouse voices the Mariners have had in recent memory.
He is as old-school as you’ll find in modern baseball, and his understated style would play in any era. He wears a mask and squats in the dirt every night; there’s a gritty authenticity to playing catcher that suits his personality.
Rodríguez captured fans’ imagination as a 21-year-old rookie in 2022, helping the Mariners end their 21-year playoff drought.
Raleigh’s star turn has been more gradual. It was his dramatic home run that clinched the team’s playoff berth in ’22 and his blunt public comments at the end of a disappointing ’23 season that endeared him to many fans who shared the same sentiments.
The spotlight on Raleigh, here and everywhere, has grown exponentially brighter with each home run he’s hit this season. A first-time All-Star, he won the MLB Home Run Derby in July – the first catcher to do that, with his dad pitching and his little brother catching – and has surpassed icons such as Johnny Bench, Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr. on various all-time home-run lists as he chases the first 60-homer season in Mariners history.
He’s been a bit sheepish whenever asked about the records he’s broken.
“My name shouldn’t be in the same sentence with those guys, Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr.,” he said in an interview after hitting two homers Tuesday in Kansas City to pass Mantle and tie Griffey’s single-season records “I don’t really have words for it. I don’t really know what to say. I’m sure one day it will set in.”
The demands on his time (and name) have steadily increased this year.
He has appeared in his first national ad campaign (for T-Mobile, a company with which Mariners managing partner John Stanton has close ties) and a handful of local commercials. “Big Dumper” has a new endorsement deal with Honey Bucket, and Everett-based Scuttlebutt brewing unveiled a new “Big Dumper” lager last month.
The new partnerships have their perks, of course: He drove away with a new pickup truck, on loan, from his appearance at the Puyallup dealership. Fans surrounded the truck to get a peek at Raleigh as he slowly drove out of the lot, honking and waving as he turned right onto River Road.
He’s been everywhere, and everyone wants to be a satellite in his orbit.
He’s joked that he can’t even stop at Costco anymore for his favorite snack (a $1.50 hot dog) without creating a scene.
“This year’s definitely been a lot different,” Raleigh said. “People have been great; they’ve been so great about everything. But it’s been so much about, ‘Oh, we saw this (home run) number last night.’ Or ‘this number the other day and we’re looking forward to seeing 52’ or whatever it is. And it’s almost like that everywhere I go now.”
He’s tried to shift the attention from his personal success to the team’s upward trajectory.
“It’s cool because it’s, like, they’re focusing on the Mariners, even with all that other stuff going on,” he said. “Bringing that together, trying to get them back to be Mariners fans and get involved and see that team again that’s in the postseason every year. So it’s been a cool little connection that you can have with them.”
Mariners manager Dan Wilson can relate.
The catcher on the Mariners’ glory-days teams in the 1990s and early 2000s, Wilson was part of the Mariners’ core group of players – Griffey, Edgar Martinez and Jay Buhner, among them – who made Seattle their year-round home and became invested in community outreach programs.
Wilson is heartened that Seattle’s newest superstar is following a similar path.
Raleigh closed this summer on a property with a few acres in Seattle’s north end, where he’s eager to settle in and stretch out. He’s also become more involved in various charitable organizations – Mariners Care and Backpack Brigade are two important ones for him – and seems to particularly enjoy being active in various youth baseball events.
“That speaks a lot about Cal, just his understanding the appreciation that he has with people here,” Wilson said. “He wants to give back and he wants to be part of this community. As we know, baseball affords you opportunities to do those kinds of things, and for him to take advantage of that is very cool.”