Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I still find the current Home Run Derby format too frenetic to really enjoy, but Cal Raleigh made me pay more attention to it than I have in a few years.
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In today’s SI:AM:
🗽 Russ on his new team
🔥 Why Miz’s ASG selection is just fine
👴 Kershaw embraces “Legend Pick”
Raleigh rallies to win
It’s official. Cal Raleigh is the best power hitter in baseball right now.
Raleigh already laid claim to that title by hitting 38 home runs in the first half of the season, the second most before the All-Star break in MLB history (trailing only Barry Bonds’s 39 in 2001). On Monday, he reinforced his claim by winning the Home Run Derby.
Raleigh is the first catcher and the first switch hitter to win the Derby, as well as the second Mariner to win the competition, joining Ken Griffey Jr., who won three times.
“Pretty cool,” Raleigh said of joining Griffey in that club. “He was there taking pictures. I know him. He’s been around in Seattle. Getting to talk to him, get some advice, and now I get to share that title with him as Mariners to win a Derby. It’s cool.”
Raleigh’s victory almost never happened, though. He barely squeaked into the second round thanks to a controversial tiebreaker after both he and Athletics DH Brent Rooker hit 17 homers in the first round. The tiebreaker in the first round goes to the player who hit the longest homer, but both Raleigh and Rooker’s longest shots were measured at 471 feet. ESPN’s Karl Ravech initially announced that because the two players were tied on the tiebreaker criteria, there would be a swing-off to determine who advanced. There was no swing-off, though. Instead, MLB used Statcast to measure the length of each homer out to 10 decimal places. Raleigh’s longest homer was measured at 470.6171452141 feet, while Rooker’s was measured at 470.5351740593 feet. That’s a difference of 0.0819711548 feet, or 0.9836538576 inches.
“My goodness gracious, that’s close,” Raleigh said of the ultrafine margin. “I mean, like, it’s just crazy. An inch off, and I’m not even in the final four, which is amazing. So I guess I got lucky there. One extra biscuit.”
It was a family affair for Raleigh, who had his father, Todd, pitching to him and his 15-year-old brother, Todd Jr., behind the plate.
“It’s a dream come true,” Todd Sr. said. “Anybody that’s ever played baseball as a kid dreams of stuff like this. I dreamed of it. He dreamed of it. When you’re a parent, you look at it differently because you want your kids to be happy.
“I can’t say how lucky and blessed I am. Everybody that plays baseball, every dad knows, I could have been that guy. Cal could have been that player. To do it as a family has been really special. I don’t know why we’ve been blessed like this. God is great, and I just, I can’t put it in words.”
After advancing to the second round by the skin of his teeth, Raleigh beat Pirates center fielder Oneil Cruz, 19–13, to advance to the final, where he defeated Rays third baseman Junior Caminero, 18–15. Seven of Raleigh’s 54 homers on the night came from the right side of the plate, all in the first round. After starting the opening round batting lefty, Raleigh switched to the right side after calling a timeout midway through the round. While Raleigh opted to bat lefty for the rest of the night, his decision to hit from the other side of the plate was still significant. He joined Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman as the only players in Derby history to hit from both sides of the plate.
Raleigh has done most of his damage this season as a lefty, hitting 22 homers from the left side, compared to 16 from the right side. But it’s Raleigh’s improvement as a righthanded hitter that is fueling his historic home run pace. Over his first four MLB seasons, Raleigh had a .455 slugging percentage as a lefty and .410 as a righty. He averaged 18.4 plate appearances per home run as a lefty and 20.65 as a righty. This year, he’s slugging .543 from the left side and an outrageous .843 from the right. He’s homered once every 13.95 plate appearances as a lefty and once every 6.88 plate appearances as a righty.
Winning the Derby is the latest way in which this has been a dream season for Raleigh, but he’ll have his sights set on bigger goals in the second half. He could become just the fourth player in the last 20 years to win the Derby and lead the majors in home runs in the same season, joining Pete Alonso (2019), Aaron Judge (2017) and Ryan Howard (2006). More importantly, Judge’s AL record of 62 home runs in a season is well within reach, and Bonds’s MLB-record 73 isn’t entirely out of the question.
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- Clayton Kershaw was on the fence about accepting his “Legend Pick” spot in the All-Star Game, Stephanie Apstein writes, but a little prodding from manager Dave Roberts and others helped put the honor in perspective.
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- The WNBA is beginning to fill out the field for Friday night’s three-point contest.
- The WNBA expansion team in Portland officially has a name.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. Oneil Cruz’s 513-foot homer.
4. The wild final 15 seconds of the Mercury–Valkyries game.
3. Johnny Furphy’s outrageous summer league dunk and the hilarious photo of Bulls first-round pick Noa Essengue getting jammed on.
2. Kyle Filipowski’s powerful dunk to tie the game for the Jazz with 1.9 seconds left in overtime.
1. Spurs forward Riley Minix’s fadeaway at the buzzer to beat Utah.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Cal Raleigh’s Dream Season Continues With Home Run Derby Win.
