Major League Baseball players are a notoriously superstitious group, but Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh may have taken things to a new level to break out of his season-long slump.
Mired in an 0-38 drought at the plate, Raleigh, 29, showered in full uniform after the Mariners’ game on Monday, May 11. Credit Seattle pitcher Logan Gilbert for the suggestion.
“Logan gave me some good advice to wash off the bad mojo or juju from the baseball gods,” Raleigh told reporters the next night. “So yeah, it worked. He was right, so I got to give him credit where credit’s due.”
Raleigh had two singles and drew a walk in Seattle’s 10-2 win over the Houston Astros on Tuesday.
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“It might have been a good call,” pitcher Bryan Woo said of Raleigh’s shower. “And who knows, maybe that’s the difference.”
Woo, 26, added that he was happy to celebrate Raleigh, his roommate during the 2024 season.
“The thing about having such a close-knit team is that you feel the weight of when other guys are going through it too,” he said. “And you want to do everything you can to help them.”
Woo continued, “But at the end of the day, not only is baseball really difficult, but it’s just like the mental side of it too, where he’s grinding through whatever, and you want to see guys succeed so badly.”
Raleigh picking up his first hits since April naturally begs the question of whether he will continue to shower in full uniform or if it really was just to “wash off the bad mojo.” Baseball players tend to stick with what’s working, whether it’s a pregame ritual, lucky socks or their walk-up music.
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“We can make fun of it. And we can do those things. And guys can laugh at their own mistakes a little bit and keep it lighthearted around here and have fun,” he said. “And it’s ultimately when we’re playing our best.”
The Mariners are just 21-22 on the season, but in a weak American League West, that puts them just a game behind the Athletics for first place. Seattle won the division last year, going 90-72 behind a historic season from Raleigh in which he set the Major League single-season home run record for a catcher with 60.
If Seattle is going to make the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2001, it will need Raleigh, a.k.a. “Big Dumper,” to start hitting consistently.
After the game on Tuesday, Mariners manager Dan Wilson reiterated his support for his star player, telling reporters, “We were all screaming for him, and it was a lot of relief, for sure, and I know it felt good for Cal.”
