How Cal Raleigh Learned To Stop Swinging But Keep Hitting Bombs

Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.

Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.

But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.

Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:

Wait, that doesn’t sound like a good thing. Raleigh used to feast when he got ahead in the count, unleashing his fearsome swing almost whenever he saw a pitch to drive. Now he’s swinging at a league-average rate. These are the best pitches in the game to be hitting. If you want to display more power without getting stronger or swinging harder, offering at more of these is just the ticket. But Raleigh is swinging at them less while hitting for more power. What gives?

What gives is that the statistic I just gave you is a bit misleading without additional context. Sure, Raleigh isn’t taking quite as much advantage of the easy pitches he sees when he’s already ahead in the count. But he’s also swinging at bad pitches in these situations less frequently. Here are a few ways of measuring that: swings in the “shadow-out” zone, which is just off the edges of the plate, swings in the “chase” zone just past that, and swings on all pitches that are out of the zone:

Not all three are career lows, but they’re all indicative of a different approach. Raleigh has always been a high-swing guy. Even this year, he’s chasing pitches outside of the strike zone more often than the league average. But in 2025, he’s holding back like never before.

One possible explanation here is that Raleigh is learning to command the strike zone. Maybe he’s figured out plate discipline after years of struggling to distinguish balls from strikes. He’s walking more often and striking out less frequently. But I don’t think that’s quite right because, again, his swing rate on pitches over the heart of the plate has declined. Instead, what we’re seeing from Raleigh is not so much an improvement in skill but a change in approach.

Consider two types of swings, one good and one bad. Swinging at a pitch over the heart of the plate? That’s good. Swinging at a pitch that’s not even near the border of the zone? That’s bad. Those are heart swing rate and chase/waste swing rate, respectively. The higher the gap between those two, the better a batter has done at the core function of pitch selection: Attacking the easy-to-hit ones and laying off the ones that are clearly out of the zone. Raleigh isn’t improving on this front. In fact, he’s at a career low, at least if you exclude his abbreviated 2021 debut:

You can think of plate discipline as the combination of two separate axes. First, there’s pitch recognition. The best guys at this – Kyle Tucker, Corey Seager, Aaron Judge, Juan Soto – are experts at telling strikes from balls. This is the hardest part of commanding the strike zone. If you have this skill, good for you! It appears to be very difficult to learn, with few hitters taking massive leaps forward from one year to the next. Raleigh is no exception, as that ratio of swings at hittable pitches to bad chases suggests.

The second part of plate discipline is just propensity to swing. At the extreme, a hitter could just choose never to swing in a given count; then he’d have a 0% chase rate in that count no matter what. This isn’t the same as correctly identifying balls from strikes. Tucker and Seager swing a lot more than Soto does despite their similarly elite ability to pick up on what the pitcher is throwing. James Wood sports a reasonable chase rate, but that’s partially because he almost never swings; he has one of the lowest heart swing rates in the league.

Changing your ability on that first axis is, as I mentioned, nearly impossible. Everyone would do it if they could, and one direction is clearly better than the other. The second axis, propensity to swing, is more complicated. Swinging more overall isn’t inherently good or bad. If Soto and Lars Nootbaar started swinging less, they would almost certainly hurt their numbers. If Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper started swinging more, they’d likely see a downturn in production, because they’re already quite aggressive.

That brings us back to Raleigh. Here’s a simple model in my head: Raleigh is a low-contact, high-power hitter. Those two things are fundamental. He’s not choosing to be one or the other, he just is. I gathered a cohort of hitters who looked, in a broad sense, like Raleigh in 2024. These were hitters who batted at least 500 times, posted a contact rate at least half a standard deviation below league average, and posted an isolated power at least half a standard deviation above league average. In plain English, we’re 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. It’s a small sample, of course, but all of these guys batted a ton in 2024, and I’m interested largely in thinking about these groups in terms of archetypes. With those 15 in hand, I separated them by their swing rates – low, medium, and high. Let’s put it this way: For hitters like Raleigh, lower swing rates seem to work wonders:

Sure, swinging less leads to a few more strikeouts. But it also grants batters a lot more walks in return, and it’s also associated with a higher slugging percentage. It’s not hard to imagine why that might be the case: If you swing a lot with a low contact rate, you’ll end up behind in a ton of counts, and the kinds of pitches you see while behind are not conducive to hitting for power. All of the players we’re looking at still managed to crush the ball. If you’re a high-swing, low-contact hitter, after all, you better have some power. But among whiff-prone boppers, the group that swings less celebrates more.

Indeed, the evidence that Raleigh is making this change is everywhere. The easiest way to think about it is that he’s never spent a higher share of his time in the batter’s box ahead in the count than he has this season. Like most hitters, he hits for a lot more power when ahead in the count. When he puts the ball in play while ahead in the count, he has a career .816 slugging percentage. When he puts the ball in play while behind, he slugs a mere .508.

What causes that gap? It’s everything. Pitchers have to venture into the heart of the plate more frequently when the hitter is ahead. Hitters can zone in on a particular pitch or area, taking if they don’t get exactly what they’re looking for. That’s a luxury they don’t have when behind in the count. Heck, hitters can just swing harder if they want, and many do. It’s not so much that Raleigh has learned how to hit when ahead in the count in 2025; he’s always known how to do that. He’s just getting ahead more frequently, which is giving him more chances to show off the very best part of his game.

Remember how I said that he’s swinging less frequently at hittable pitches when ahead in the count? It’s true from a frequency standpoint, no doubt. But despite that, he’s taking more hacks at hittable pitches per plate appearance than he ever has before. That’s because he’s getting to these advantageous spots more often. He’s seeing more fastballs over the heart of the plate, and swinging at more fastballs over the heart of the plate, too.

Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+? No way. But I do think it means he’s very likely to improve on his numbers as compared to the past, and he was already quite good in the past. For hitters like Raleigh – powerful but whiff-prone – there’s a clear benefit to swinging less frequently. It forces pitchers to meet you in the strike zone more frequently or risk losing you to a walk – and plenty of pitchers aren’t willing to take that risk. The cost isn’t huge, because even though Raleigh is surrendering some swings at hittable pitches, he’s generating more pitches to hit by getting ahead in the count more often.

Even though nothing else about his game has changed, a rough translation of his new approach says that this should be worth around 5-10 points of wRC+. As Leo Morgenstern noted today, Raleigh is DH’ing more frequently this year, and while he hasn’t hit well when DH’ing, the rest surely also adds to his offensive prowess; it’s easier to keep your body fresh to hit when you aren’t always playing the most demanding defensive position on the field. Combine those two things, and of course Raleigh is hitting better.

Can he keep this approach up? I don’t see any reason why not, at least in the short term. Baseball is a game of adjustments, and pitchers will have to try something to disrupt Raleigh’s current form. Maybe they’ll attack the zone early, hoping that his recent changes lead to more takes and pitchers’ counts. Maybe they’ll switch to attacking with in-zone secondaries, just to give him a different look. He’s been feasting on everything this year, but particularly on fastballs. Maybe they’ll find a hole in his swing and force him to change something else to adjust.

Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. But I can say this without a doubt: Raleigh was swinging too much before. It wasn’t so much a matter of bad pitch recognition; he just came up there wanting to hit. Dialing that propensity back has made him more dangerous. He was already a career 111 wRC+ hitter, and now I think he’s better than that. Combine that with his elite defense, and we might be looking at the new Best Catcher in Baseball. Maybe other power hitters should follow the Big Dumper’s lead and just swing a little less.