TORONTO — The ballots were cast before the playoffs started. Nothing Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh does in the postseason will influence the American League MVP voting. The same was true of Aaron Judge before the New York Yankees were eliminated.
But man, if ever there was a game to show why Raleigh would be a deserving winner, it was Game 1 of the American League Championship Series on Sunday night, in which the Mariners defeated the Toronto Blue Jays, 3-1.
The victory was especially momentous for the Mariners, considering the circumstances. The 15-inning marathon they survived to win the deciding game of their Division Series against the Detroit Tigers on Friday night. The cross-continent flight they took from Seattle to Toronto on Saturday. The pitcher they chose, right-hander Bryce Miller, to make his first career start on three days rest Sunday, kicking off the team’s first ALCS appearance in 24 years.
Raleigh, who caught 209 pitches in Game 5 of the DS, was at the center of it all, playing any number of familiar roles — slugger, receiver, pitcher whisperer, Kevin Gausman dominator, Rogers Centre owner. Plus, for those who recall some ill-conceived remarks from Jays manager John Schneider in April 2023, avenger, too.
I am not here to relitigate the case for either Raleigh or Judge. I did not have an AL MVP vote this year, but my personal belief is there was no wrong choice. Both players had historic seasons, in different ways. A tie — the same kind that occurred in the 1979 NL race between the St. Louis Cardinals’ Keith Hernandez and Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell — would be entirely appropriate.
Whatever the outcome, the breadth of what Raleigh undertakes on a nightly basis, playing the most important defensive position on the field and hitting home runs like no switch-hitter in major-league history, remains nothing short of astonishing.
Consider what Raleigh did Sunday night:
*Crushed a sixth-inning homer after Gausman retired 15 straight batters, giving the Mariners their first run and tying the score.
*Made an extended mound visit to help Miller escape a 27-pitch first inning that started with a first-pitch home run by George Springer and included two walks.
*And finally, after navigating Miller through six innings, caught scoreless innings from three different relievers.
Against a team that pounded the Yankees for 34 runs in four games, the Mariners retired 23 of their last 24 hitters, finishing the Jays on a tidy 100 pitches. But for the toughest Cal since Ripken Jr., the 6-foot-2, 235-pound rock who plays through one ache and pain after another, it was essentially just another day at the yard.
Including postseason, Raleigh is now 8-for-17 (.471) with four homers against Gausman, one of the premier pitchers in the game. At Rogers Centre, he is 17-for-54 (.315) with nine homers and 19 RBIs. But afterward, much of the talk revolved around his visit to Miller after the pitcher’s second walk of the first inning.
Miller said he could not recall what exactly what Raleigh told him, explaining, “Sometimes he thinks he has jokes, and I give him a courtesy laugh, a little chuckle and settle back down and keep going.”
The Mariners’ Game 2 starter, righty Logan Gilbert, had his own interesting take on what he described as Raleigh’s “weird mound visits.”
“Sometimes he doesn’t say anything, or maybe I’m missing what he says,” Gilbert said. “But he just kind of walks out there and stands there and looks at me. It’s kind of awkward sometimes. I think there’s an intention there. I’m trying to figure out what it is.”
Ah, but enough ribbing. Miller conceded that Raleigh always times his visits properly, slowing pitchers down and getting them back in the zone. Gilbert, too, acknowledged that Raleigh knows what he’s doing. And Mariners manager Dan Wilson praised Raleigh for his visit, saying he calmed Miller down during an inning that, “could have exploded pretty quickly.”
It didn’t, but even though Miller settled in, allowing just two baserunners after the first inning, the Mariners trailed entering the sixth, 1-0.
In Raleigh’s first at-bat against Gausman, he singled on a first-pitch fastball. In his second, Gausman threw him five straight split-fingered fastballs, striking him out. Raleigh’s next turn came in the sixth, with none on and two out.
He got ahead of Gausman 2-0, then took a called strike on a perfect split down and in that barely nicked the zone. Gausman practically bounced his next splitter, and Raleigh fouled it off for strike two. Then came another split, down, but not down enough. Raleigh pounded it to right-center for his 62nd homer of the season, including playoffs.
O, Cal-ada!@keybank | #SeizeTheMoment pic.twitter.com/y6YsYgkHTm
— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) October 13, 2025
“I just choked up and wasn’t trying to do too much,” Raleigh said. “I was just trying to get bat on ball and really put something in play, maybe find a hole. I didn’t want to punch out again.”
After a walk to Julio Rodríguez, Schneider pulled Gausman at 76 pitches. Jorge Polanco hit an RBI single later that inning and another in the eighth. But it was Raleigh’s homer, in the words of third baseman Eugenio Suárez, that, “woke us up.”
“Gausman was splitting him to death the whole night. If he would have made the pitch and got it down where it was strike to ball, you never know,” Mariners hitting coach Kevin Seitzer said.
“But Cal saw it up and put a good swing on it. And the cool thing was, it was a controlled swing. He wasn’t trying to do too much, and he crushed it. That’s how it works for him. He makes adjustments really, really well.”
To think, Schneider in April 2023 said Raleigh was “not very tough to pitch to when you execute your pitches.” Even then, coming off a game in which Raleigh hit two homers in a 10-8 Mariners win, the manager’s remark was cringeworthy.
“He’s hitting .200,” Schneider said. “I know he’s done damage against us, and I think if you execute, he’s obviously got big damage potential and he’s got a lot of strikeout potential, too. And when you execute your pitches, you usually get the job done.”
Raleigh fired back at Schneider a year later, saying, “I know a lot of guys have beef with him in this league,” adding, “if you don’t have anything nice, don’t say it all, I guess, if you don’t want it to come back on you.”
Naturally, Schneider was asked to revisit his comments before Sunday night’s game.
“Well, for one, that’s me as a young interim manager saying what I said to try to fire up my team, which obviously I shouldn’t have said,” said Schneider, who actually had lost his interim tag by then and was in the first year of a three-year contract.
“I’ve got a ton of respect for him as a player and where he’s taken his game both at the plate and behind the plate to do it as well as he’s done it and to catch as many games as he catches. … I don’t want that to be a narrative in this series at all. I think he’s a phenomenal player.”
Sunday night, Raleigh showed it again. He is now 10-for-25 (.400) in the postseason while the rest of the Mariners are 35-for-193 (.181). He also has caught every inning of every game, 61 in all, after playing 1,072 innings behind the plate during the regular season, third only to Philadelphia’s J.T. Realmuto (1,151 1/3) and Milwaukee’s William Contreras (1,111 2/3).
Is he the AL MVP? We’ll find out in November. But in Game 1, Raleigh donned the tools of ignorance and performed with his usual intelligence, putting his stamp on the game in all the ways that only he can. Then he shrugged and got ready to do it again in Game 2, less than 24 hours away.
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