There’s an insanely short list of players who have hit 60 or more home runs in a single Major League Baseball season.
You may have heard of some of them – Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Maris, Aaron Judge. You may have also noticed that catcher – catcher! – Cal Raleigh of the Seattle Mariners achieved that feat just last year.
Raleigh in 2026 has admittedly been a shell of his 2025 self. Like Eugenio Suarez of the Cincinnati Reds, Raleigh has been dealing with an oblique strain
that cost him a month of the season already, and it’s the kind of injury that messes with strength and timing within a swing even on the days when there’s no lingering pain. Still, we’re talking about a guy who didn’t just hit 60 homers last season but also a guy who averaged 30 dingers a year over the three seasons before that while picking up MVP votes all along the way.
That’s not exactly the recipe for the kind of player you’d think to go out of your way to pitch to with a game on the line. It’s certainly not the type of player you’d think you’d go out of your way to pitch to with your season on the line.
On Monday night in Seattle, though, some inverted cosmos prompted Reds manager Terry Francona to go galaxy brain and do precisely that.
Andrew Abbott had pitched brilliantly while Seattle starter George Kirby had blanked the lifeless Reds offense, and only a pair of questionable defensive plays from Cincinnati’s middle infield had allowed a lone run on Seattle’s ledger in a 1-0 game. Pierce Johnson had labored while taking over in the Bottom of the 7th, and Francona summoned lefty Caleb Ferguson from the bullpen to try to navigate through the packed bases as the heart of the Mariners lineup was due up.
With the lefty on the mound, Tito prompted Ferguson to walk Dominic Canzone to load the bases and set up a potential double play that would end the inning. Canzone, of course, hits left handed. Walking Canzone to load the bases brought up the switch-hitting Raleigh, who turned to his right side to welcome the lefty Ferguson’s offerings.
The first pitch? It couldn’t have been more of a meatball.
Raleigh destroyed a hanging breaker right over the heart of the plate into the LF bleachers for a grand slam that broke the game wide open, and in the process seemed to sink every single thing remaining from this debacle of a Reds season with it to the bottom of Puget Sound.
It always seemed as if this Reds club was specifically constructed to be a half-run short and a dollar late. That, of course, is how you save money at the margins. The presumptive hope from the front office, it has always seemed, was that hiring a manager with Francona’s reputation would simply be enough to make up for playing with a hand constantly tied behind their backs.
That simply hasn’t worked. It sure as hell didn’t work last night.
You can certainly make the claim that if the pitchers in the bullpen who were given free agent contracts to come pitch for a team who was constantly going to be in tight games (since they can’t ever seem to blow anyone out) should have simply done their jobs better. That’s true, and has been the case all season long. But at this juncture, with grasping at every single last straw there is in an attempt to save the crap season, Tito played a hand that he had zero business playing and his bluff got called in the biggest, baddest of ways.
That’s it for the Reds. That, right there, is the nail in their coffin.
