On Wednesday night, Seattle Mariners all-star catcher and designated hitter Cal Raleigh smashed his 59th and 60th home runs against the Colorado Rockies, becoming only the 7th player in Major League Baseball history to accomplish the feat of hitting 60 home runs in a single season.
The only other players to reach 60 home runs in a season are Babe Ruth (1927), Roger Maris (1961), Mark McGwire (1998, '99), Sammy Sosa (1998, '99, 2001), Barry Bonds (2001), and Aaron Judge (2022).
The switch-hitter clubbed a towering 438-foot homer into Seattle's third deck for number 59.
OH MY GOODNESS, CAL 🤯
— Seattle Mariners - y (@Mariners) September 25, 2025
No. 59 went ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP DECK! pic.twitter.com/draXsM2BwE
Number 60 wasn't quite as Homeric, but it got the job done.
THAT IS NUMBER 60 FOR CAL!!! HISTORY! pic.twitter.com/aOsjshML2P
— Seattle Mariners - y (@Mariners) September 25, 2025
It's the "Age of the Home Run" (again) in baseball. Certain eras have featured plenty of sluggers, including the 1990s, when Oakland A's slugger McGuire and Chicago Cubs power hitter Sosa vied to see which steroid-fueled hitter would reach 70 home runs.
Neither slugger was ever caught using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), but neither slugger has been elected to the Hall of Fame either. McGuire admitted to using PEDs, while Sosa has never acknowledged his guilt, but in 2024, he issued a statement that all but admitted his PED use.
"There were times I did whatever I could to recover from injuries in an effort to keep my strength up... I never broke any laws, but in hindsight, I made mistakes and I apologize," Sosa said in a statement.
Both men may get voted into the Hall by the Veterans Committee.
That same hope resides in the heart of the best player in Major League Baseball history. A New York Times statistical model published in August names Barry Bonds the greatest of all time over Babe Ruth.
"A new ranking methodology places Barry Bonds over Babe Ruth as the game’s best player ever. Statisticians, at least, are cheering," reports the Times.
According to the Times, Daniel J. Eck, a statistician at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, "who led the new study and has been working on the model for about a decade," allowed for the use of PEDs in his statistical model.
“I’m OK with a PED-laden person being number one, over, say, a person who played before baseball was integrated,” Dr. Eck said. In other words, despite Bonds’s steroid use, he put up more impressive numbers, in era-adjusted terms, than Ruth.
It has little to do with race, per se. It's a statistical fact that the integrated era is far more competitive than when the game was white only, made so by the addition of black players and especially, black pitchers.
I'm not a huge fan of sabermetrics, or the study of statistics in sports. Too often, managers rely too much on raw data. Experts claim this model is the best around.
“It’s arguably the state of the art, at this point, for player evaluation over time,” said Dr. Michael J. Schell, an oncologist and biostatistician at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, who also writes about baseball.
There's more to Barry Bonds, of course. Compare the surly, pouting slugger of the San Francisco Giants with the garrulous Seattle star Cal Raleigh, and you understand perhaps the primary reason people were cheering for the 28-year-old catcher while Bonds was getting death threats before he broke Babe Ruth's career Home Run record of 714.
Barry Bonds was disliked by opposing fans and every baseball beat reporter in the U.S. at the time. The feelings were definitely mutual. Since baseball writers vote on the Hall of Fame ballot, it's not surprising that Bonds was never in the running. In his last year of eligibility, he received 68% of the vote, while a player needs 75% to enter the Hall. In his first year on the ballot, Bonds received 36% of the vote.
But steroids or not, 75% of his on-field contemporaries believed him to be the greatest slugger ever. That's because pro ballplayers know you can juice up all you want, but that won't help you in the batter's box with a ball coming at you at 95 MPH.
I wrote this when Bonds was on trial for purchasing illegal steroids in 2007.
There is no more difficult task in sports than a baseball batter’s attempt to hit a round ball careening toward him from a little more than 60 feet away, inches from his person, at more than 90 miles per hour with a rounded stick of wood weighing on average 34 ounces. The 5-ounce ball of tightly wound horsehide around a plug of cork can be made by the pitcher when thrown to dip, to shoot left or right, to slide, to flutter, or to hop like a scared rabbit.
As it leaves the pitcher’s hand, the batter has about 2/10 of a second to read the pitch and decide whether to swing the bat or not. In those fractions of a second, the player must decide what kind of pitch is being thrown, how fast it is going to be arriving at home plate, and whether or not the ball will cross home plate for a strike. Being off a couple thousandths of a second means the difference between hitting the ball or not. And the pitcher, God bless him, has other tricks up his sleeve as well. He can change speeds from pitch to pitch to keep the hitter off balance. He can change the angle of his arm when he delivers the ball – coming “over the top” or “dropping down” and slinging the ball almost sidearm. This will change the rotation of the seams against the air between the mound and home plate causing the ball to shoot across the plate while diving downward.
What good are big muscles when trying to hit a baseball? Sure, once you connect, the ball might fly a little farther. But Bonds was a career .298 hitter. He was known to have the best batting eye in the business. This is evidenced by the best in baseball history, 2,558 walks, including an incredible 688 intentional walks. Pitchers would walk home a run by giving Bonds an intentional pass with the bases loaded rather than risk facing him in a clutch situation.
Bonds had all the tools: speed, power, hit for average, a premier run producer, and a good, but not great, arm. Perhaps it's time for the Veterans Committee to relent and give Bonds the props he deserves.
