Cal Raleigh's home run on Sunday Night Baseball barely made it out. Statcast measured the ball at just 327 feet — a distance that would have been a homer in only one other ballpark in the majors — and it snuck into the Crawford Boxes in the sixth inning to help the Seattle Mariners edge the Houston Astros 3-2 and take the series in Houston.

For most hitters, a cheap homer that saves a series is a footnote. For Raleigh, it's the headline of one of the strangest seasons in recent memory. A year ago, the switch-hitting catcher led all of baseball with 60 home runs, drove in 125 runs, finished runner-up in AL MVP voting, and became the first catcher — and first switch-hitter — to win the Home Run Derby. In 2026, he's batting .159/.264/.299. As Yahoo Sports and Barstool Baseball noted before Sunday's game, Raleigh had accumulated fewer total hits in 2026 than the 60 home runs he hit in all of 2025 combined — a statistical oddity that has followed him around the league all summer.

A drought, briefly interrupted

Sunday's blast was only Raleigh's second hit in his last seven games, and NBC Sports noted he still hasn't recorded a multi-hit game since July 7. It was his 13th home run of the year — barely a fifth of last season's total with roughly six weeks still to play.

Raleigh entered one April game this year slashing .132/.233/.184 with no home runs — a stretch so bad it briefly overshadowed the historic year that preceded it.

Randy Arozarena also went deep for Seattle, a first-inning solo shot, while Houston got matching solo homers from Jeremy Peña and Nick Allen. Mariners starter Bryan Woo picked up the win, working six innings and allowing two runs on three hits with five strikeouts, improving to 9-8. Astros starter Hunter Brown took the loss despite a quality outing marred by five walks. Closer Andrés Muñoz worked around a walk for his 22nd save, and reliever Seranthony Domínguez escaped a bases-loaded jam in the eighth by striking out Daulton Varsho, per Fox13 Seattle's game recap.

The win pushed Seattle to 9-2 against Houston this season and kept the Mariners in the thick of the AL playoff picture heading into the stretch run. But the larger story around the club remains what to make of Raleigh's collapse — whether it's an anomaly, a hangover from an unprecedented workload in 2025, or something the Mariners need to address before October. For now, Seattle will take the series win and the solo shot, even if it barely made it over the wall.