Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I guess I should apologize to the Idaho State Bengals for saying they didn’t stand a chance against UNLV. They led for most of the game and UNLV barely escaped with a victory.
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In today’s SI:AM:
⛳ Fleetwood’s big win
🤠 Arch Manning’s time to shine
🏈 NFL preseason takeaways
Big Dumper passes Salvy
Cal Raleigh put his name in the record book on Sunday with a two-homer game that brought his season total to 49, the most by a catcher in MLB history.
Both homers came off of Athletics starter Jacob Lopez. In the first inning, Lopez left a 92 mph fastball over the heart of the plate and Raleigh launched it into the second deck in left field. It traveled an estimated 448 feet, his longest homer of the season. Then, in the second, Lopez’s first pitch to Raleigh was a changeup, again thrown right over the center of the plate. Raleigh blasted that one 412 feet to left center.
It was his ninth multi-homer game this season, but his first with two dingers that traveled at least 400 feet.
The pair of homers gave Raleigh the new single-season record for home runs by a catcher, breaking the previous mark of 48 set by the Royals’ Salvador Perez in 2021. After Raleigh’s second homer, the fans in Seattle stayed on their feet to entice him to come out for a curtain call. It was a moment Raleigh said he wasn’t expecting.
“Special moment. I’ll definitely remember that,” Raleigh told reporters later. “I didn’t know [the curtain call] would be a thing. They were kind of pushing me out there, and I was [like] ‘I don’t want to look dumb if I go out there,’ but it was really cool seeing everybody up there on their feet.”
Raleigh has had an outstanding season, but he’s cooled off in the past couple of months. Through the end of June, he was batting .276 with a 1.036 OPS and 33 homers in 83 games. Since the start of July, though, he’s slipped to a .197 batting average and .781 OPS, although he’s still hit plenty of homers (16 in 45 games).
The question now becomes how many other records Raleigh can set. During his torrid first three months of the season, it seemed like there was even an outside chance that he could challenge Barry Bonds’s record of 73 home runs. That’s gone out the window, but Raleigh is well within striking distance of Mickey Mantle’s record of 54 home runs by a switch-hitter, set in 1961.
Aaron Judge’s American League record of 62 home runs remains a possibility as well, although Raleigh would have to get pretty hot down the stretch to challenge that mark. Raleigh currently sits 13 homers shy of tying Judge and 14 away from breaking the record with 31 games left in the season. When Judge set the record in 2022, he had 51 homers at the same point in the season.
For context, Raleigh has hit as many as 17 home runs in a 31-game span this season, but it’s taken him 42 games to hit his last 14 home runs. It’s possible that Raleigh could start hitting again like he did in the first half of the season and equal or surpass Judge, but it’s far from a certainty.
Judge’s pursuit of Roger Maris’s record was equally close. He tied the mark with seven games left to play but didn’t break it until the second-to-last day of the season. Raleigh’s pursuit of Judge has a chance to be even more thrilling, though. At the time, Judge’s chase of Maris was just about the only reason to tune into a Yankees game. New York held a healthy lead in the AL East for the entire second half of the season en route to a 99–63 record. Raleigh’s Mariners, meanwhile, are in the thick of a tight playoff race. They currently hold the third and final wild-card spot in the AL, three games ahead of the Royals, and sit two games behind the Astros for first place in the West. The Mariners will need Raleigh to mash if they want to claim their first division title in 24 years. Imagine how thrilling each Raleigh homer will be over the final month of the season when it has historical significance on top of playoff significance.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- The NFL preseason is in the books. Gilberto Manzano looks back at what we learned in the third and final week of exhibition games.
- Michael Rosenberg writes that Arch Manning, Texas’s new starting quarterback and heir to football’s most famous family, is striving to ignore the hype and focus on developing his game.
- Bob Harig details that Tommy Fleetwood ended years of close calls by winning the Tour Championship—his first PGA Tour victory—along with the FedEx Cup.
- With seven at-large spots available in the College Football Playoff, Pat Forde warns that this season is poised to ignite fierce politicking and statistical cherry-picking as teams fight for bids.
- Freshman Bryce Underwood has reportedly been named Michigan’s starting quarterback for the 2025 season opener against New Mexico—becoming just the fourth true freshman ever to start the season opener for the Wolverines and the first since 2009. He has said that he’s ready to “shock the world.”
The top five…
… things I saw yesterday:
5. The toddler at the Mariners game who went face-first into a bag of popcorn.
4. A beautiful play at third base by Carlos Correa. He’s adjusting just fine to his new position.
3. Nneka Ogwumike’s fadeaway at the buzzer to give the Storm the win over the Mystics.
2. Shohei Ohtani’s 45th homer of the season. He’s tied with Kyle Schwarber for the NL lead.
1. Ohtani’s friendly interaction with a heckler after the homer. “Very annoying, as he’s in my right ear the entire game,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of the heckler. “But it was out of character from Shohei. He was wearing him out the whole game. So it was good to see Shohei initiate a high-five from him. That was great. That was fun. It was good for Shohei to show his personality.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Cal Raleigh Sets One Record While Pursuing Another.