How Cal Raleigh learns to stop swaying but keep hitting the bomb

Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. At least on the offense, that was his phone card. In each of his three major league seasons, he released under-average OBP and above-average offensive lines. In the sponge T-Mobile Park, the hardest hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and 2024's .436 hit percentage are the complete Titanic. However, this year, he has dabbled in something new.

Or, his result is definitely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It doesn’t come from a more primitive power. Maximum exit speed? Raleigh is fine. His average export speed is not his tough speed either, both of which are consistent with 2024. His bat speed is the same. He was doing it his way when he tried to hit a home run.

But while his ability to play baseball hard may be the same as ever, he proves it more often than ever. Both put the ball in the air and pulled his elevated contact more often, while more hits were barrels. He lowered the frequency with his career-high contact rate and career-sluggish strike rate.

Nothing is so simple that it is driven by one thing, but I think there is an important change driving the surge in Raleigh. Actually, this is something he has been working on for several years. Raleigh is waving more than ever when the pitcher throws his meatballs on the heart of the plate:

Wait, this doesn't sound like a good thing. Raleigh once had a feast when he was leading the Count, releasing his terrible swing almost whenever he saw the driving court. Now, he swings at the league average speed. These are the best courses in the game. If you want to show off more power without getting stronger or harder, then more features are offered in it is just tickets. But Raleigh didn't sway much at them while hitting more power. What to give?

What is given is that the statistic I just gave you is not somewhat misleading in other contexts. Of course, the advantage of the relaxing court that Raleigh saw when he was already ahead of the count is not that many. But in these cases, he also waved the court less frequently. Here are a few measures: swing in the Shadow Range area, it swings just beyond the edge of the plate in the Chase area and swings over the pitch in all distances:

Not all three are career lows, but they all show different approaches. Raleigh has always been a high guy. Even this year, he chased the court more frequently than the league average at the field outside the strike zone. But in 2025, he retreated as before.

The possible explanation here is that Raleigh is learning to direct the strike zone. After years of hard work to separate the ball from the strike, maybe he has figured out the plate discipline. He walked frequently and had fewer strikes. But I think that's wrong because he's likewise, his swing speed in the center of the plate dropped. Instead, what we see from Raleigh is not a skill improvement, but a change in methodology.

Consider two types of swings, one good and the other bad. Swing on the pitch of the heart of the plate? That's pretty good. Swinging on a court that isn't near the area's boundaries? That's awful. These are the slew rate and the chase/waste swing rate respectively. The higher the gap between the two, the better the batter performs in the core function of pitch selection: attacks the gap that is easy to hit and gets rid of obvious areas. Raleigh has not improved in this regard. In fact, his career is low, at least if you rule out his 2021 abbreviation:

You can think of board discipline as a combination of two independent axes. First, there is tone recognition. The best people – Kyle Tucker, Corey Seager, Aaron Judge, Juan Soto – are experts in telling the ball strike. This is the hardest part of commanding the strike zone. If you have this skill, it will be good for you! It seems difficult to learn, and few batsmen make great leaps from one year to the next. Raleigh is no exception, as the swing ratio on the easy court with bad chase is shown.

The second part of board discipline is just a tendency to lean. In extreme cases, the batsman can choose to never swing in a given count. Then, no matter what, he will have a 0% chase rate. This is not the same as correctly identifying a strike ball. Although Tucker and Seager have much more swings than Soto, despite their equally elite ability to pick up what the pitcher throws. James Wood has a reasonable chase rate, but that's partly because he almost never swings. He is one of the lowest swing rates in the league center.

As I mentioned, the ability to change the first axis is nearly impossible. Everyone will do it if they can, one direction is obviously better than the other. The second axis (swing tendency) is more complicated. The overall swing is not inherently good or bad. If Soto and Lars Nootbaar start to reduce the swing, they will almost certainly hurt their numbers. If Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper start to swing more, they may see production drops because they are already very positive.

This brings us back to Raleigh. Here is a simple model in my mind: Raleigh is a low-contact high-power batsman. These two things are basic. He is not choosing to be one or the other, he is just. I've collected a series of batsmen, broadly, like Raleigh in 2024. These batsmen hit at least 500 times, with contact rates at least below the standard deviation of the league average and posted isolated abilities, with at least half of the standard deviation above the league average. In simple English, we are talking about low-contact, high-power hitters.

That gave me a group of 15 hitters from 2024: Raleigh, Harper, Judge, Willy Adames, Shohei Ohtani, Shea Langeliers, Eugenio Suárez, Rafael Devers, Jake Burger, Colton Cowser, Marcell Ozuna, Kyle Schwarber, Teoscar Hernández, Brent Rooker, Elly De La Cruz. Of course, this was a small sample, but all of these guys hit a ton in 2024, and I was interested in considering these groups from the prototype. The 15 I got in my hand, I separated them with their swing speed (low, medium and high). Let's say this: For a batsman like Raleigh, the lower swing seems to have done a miracle:

Of course, fewer swings lead to strikeouts. But this also makes the batsman pay more and it is also related to higher slip percentages. It's not hard to imagine why it might be like this: If you swing a lot with a low contact rate, you'll end up with a lot of counts, and the various pitches you see when you're behind are not conducive to hitting the force. All the players we were looking for still managed to smash the ball. After all, if you are a high spin, low contact hitter, you'd better have some strength. But among the easily occurring boppers, groups with less swing celebrated more.

Indeed, evidence of Raleigh's change is everywhere. The easiest way to consider this is that he never spent more time in the batsman’s box than this season. Like most batsmen, he hit more power when he scored. When he threw the ball into the goal, he had a .816 hit percentage in his career. He beat only .508 when he put the ball behind.

What causes the gap? That's everything. When the batsman is ahead, the pitcher must venture into the heart of the plate more frequently. Batsmen can zone on a specific court or area and can adopt if they don’t get what they need. This is a luxury they don't have after counting. Heck, the batsman can swing harder if needed, many people can. Raleigh learned how to strike when he led the 2025 Count. He always knew what to do. He just made progress more often, which gave him more opportunities to show off the best part of his game.

Remember what I said was that he swung less frequently when he was leading the Count? There is no doubt that this is correct from a frequency standpoint. But, despite this, he has more attacking power than ever with a per-dish appearance. That's because he is get For these favorable attractions. He saw more fastballs on the heart of the plate and more fastballs on the heart of the plate.

Does all this mean that Raleigh will maintain his 170 WRC+? never. But I do think that means that he will likely improve his numbers compared to the past and that he has been good in the past. For bats like Raleigh (strong but prone to occur), there is a clear benefit to a smaller swing frequency. It forces pitchers to meet you more often in the strike zone, or risk losing a walk – many pitchers are reluctant to take risks. The cost is not huge, because even if Raleigh surrendered to some swinging courts, he would generate more courts by making progress more frequently.

Even if his game hasn't changed, a rough translation of his new approach says that this should be worth about 5-10 WRC+. As Leo Morgenstern said, Raleigh has a higher DH frequency this year, and although he didn't play well at DHING, the rest certainly added to his offensive abilities as well. Keep your body fresh and hit when you don't always play the most demanding defensive position on the field. Combining these two things, of course, Raleigh hits better.

Can he keep approaching? At least in the short term, I can't see any reason why I don't do it. Baseball is a tweaking game where pitchers will have to try something to ruin Raleigh’s current form. Maybe they will attack the area early, hoping his recent changes will lead to more breakeven and the number of pitchers. Maybe they will turn to a secondary offense in the area just to make him look different. He has been enjoying everything this year, especially fastball. Maybe they'll find a hole in his swing and force him to change something else to make adjustments.

Prediction is difficult to make, especially about the future. But I can say this without a doubt: Raleigh used to be too much. This is not a question of bad tone recognition; he just got there and wanted to play. The tendency to turn back makes him even more dangerous. He's already a career as a 111 WRC+ batsman and now I think he's better than that. Combining it with his elite defense, we may be working on the new best catcher in baseball. Maybe other power bats should follow the lead of the big fool and then lower it a little bit.