Updated

Updated · Sports Illustrated · Aug 6

Cal Raleigh's OPS Falls to .579 After 60-Homer Season as Fastballs Expose Sharp Decline

Updated

Updated · Sports Illustrated · Aug 6

Cal Raleigh's OPS Falls to .579 After 60-Homer Season as Fastballs Expose Sharp Decline

Q: With bat speed unchanged, what invisible flaw is secretly fueling the most dramatic offensive collapse in modern baseball?

The hidden flaw is timing, not bat speed. Raleigh’s swing is arriving too late, especially against fastballs, even though the raw speed of the bat is nearly unchanged. Statcast and team analysis point to a widened timing window in 2026: fewer “perfect” swings, more flawed ones, and much worse results on velocity. His bat speed has held around 74.6-74.7 mph, close to last year’s mark, and his swing path has not changed meaningfully. What has changed is when the barrel gets to the ball. That shows up most clearly in his depth of contact. Against fastballs, Raleigh is making contact about three inches deeper in the zone than he did in 2025, dropping from roughly 5.2 inches out front to 1.9. For a pull-side slugger, that is enormous. Balls he used to turn on for home runs are now becoming weaker contact, opposite-field flies, or misses. The timing breakdown appears tied to both pitch recognition and approach. His chase rate has risen, his swing timing distribution has spread out, and his production against 95-plus mph fastballs has collapsed. Pitchers have noticed and are attacking him with more heaters because he has been consistently late. The oblique injury likely helped trigger the problem by disrupting both his physical swing and mental rhythm, but the larger collapse is being driven by that nearly invisible sequencing issue: his load and contact point are just a fraction late, and at MLB velocity, that fraction has changed everything.

3 articles · Updated · Sports Illustrated · Aug 6

Raleigh finished July with a .579 OPS and 11 home runs, a stunning drop one year after posting a .948 OPS and blasting 60 homers for Seattle.
Statcast data points to his biggest problem: velocity. Pitchers are attacking him with more fastballs, and he has been chronically late getting to them.
Against velocity, the decline is stark — after hitting .242 with a .570 slugging percentage on such pitches in 2025, Raleigh is batting .137 with a .219 slugging percentage in 2026.
The collapse is historically rare: among 54 seasons in which a player hit 50 home runs, none followed with an OPS lower than Chris Davis's .704 in 2014.