Among the many, many, many impressive things about Cal Raleigh‘s 60-homer 2025 is something a lot more mundane, but extremely important: He showed up every day.
Ralegh played in 159 games. He took 705 plate appearances. In Sunday’s Game 1 of the ALCS, he caught all nine innings less than 48 hours after he caught all 209 pitches in Friday night’s 15-inning long ALDS epic. Then he caught all nine again on Monday, as the Mariners grabbed a 2-0 series lead over the Blue Jays in Toronto.
Going back to 1961, when the schedule expanded to its current 162 games, only one catcher (defined here and throughout as someone who spent at least half their time behind the plate) took more plate appearances in a regular season: Hall of Famer and probably The Best Catcher Ever Johnny Bench, who had 708 back in 1974. Bench’s Reds, in those pre-Wild Card days, finished in second place despite a 98-64 record, and went home.
This year’s Mariners obviously have not yet called it a season, so Raleigh, entering Game 3 on Wednesday back in Seattle, is now up to 739 total plate appearances this season. Understanding that present-day catchers have additional opportunities afforded by the expanded postseason that weren’t always there, it is almost certainly the most plate appearances any catcher has ever taken in a season.
This is, obviously, a credit to Raleigh himself, to his physical preparation and general toughness. He played through a broken tooth for a game early last year, and he caught all 18 innings of a 2022 playoff game with a broken catching thumb that had torn ligaments that later required surgery, and assuredly he’s dealt with all sorts of other bumps and bruises that come with being a catcher at the highest level. But that’s true of most catchers, too. It’s a tough job. It’s only getting tougher, given that while batters have to deal with ever increasing velocity, spin, and movement, so do the men tasked with receiving them, too.
Despite that, in 2025, catchers put up their highest Wins Above Replacement (WAR) mark (79.7) of the 30-team era, per FanGraphs, and the second-best hitting season in that time. Most notably: More of the top catchers were able to play more often, which would certainly track with better performance overall. While that’s a little about the more recent introduction of the DH in the National League allowing for half-days off, this also holds true if we just look at the AL, which has had the DH the entire time. This year saw that league’s highest WAR, and best hitting performance, too.
After a number of years when it seemed like the two-catcher model was overtaking the primary catcher – much as we’ve seen in hockey, with goalies – the trend has perhaps turned back the other way. Is it possible, then, that we’re seeing the results of exactly what catchers kept telling us would happen as the sport transitioned to the one-knee approach that now has 95% of pitches caught with at least one knee down? After all the research that shows that the tactic improves framing and doesn’t hurt blocking – can it also improve health, too?
Just listen to what they say about it.
In the fall of 2021, Ryan Lavarnway, a 10-year Major League veteran then nearing the end of a 16-season professional career, wrote a blog post about his experience using the one-knee down approach for a full season for the first time. He was quite clear that while the original motivation was about improving his framing skills, he was then surprised to learn that his blocking had improved, too. The kicker was at the end. Lavarnway, 33 years old at the time, found positive physical effects.
“Another thing I learned,” Lavarnway wrote. “It helped keep me healthier. Supporting my full weight in a squat for less time kept my legs fresh for my last at bat every game.”
This summer, it was first-time Rockies All-Star Hunter Goodman, saying “You think about back in the day when everybody was squatting … being in a squat for that long can be hard on your legs. Getting on a knee gives your legs a little bit of rest for sure.”
“The reason they did that,” said Cubs coach Jerry Weinstein, appearing on a podcast in April, “[is] because they perform better. It’s easier on their body, requires less flexibility, balance, strength, and they get better performance. It’s very, very simple. They don’t do stuff that doesn’t help them win games,” later adding that “one of the biggest reasons that that catchers adopted it … they weren’t as fatigued, and it just didn’t require as as much effort to catch from a knee down situation.”
Weinstein literally wrote the book on catching. This all echoes exactly what we learned in a number of quotes from catchers and coaches when looking into the one-knee trend last year.
We could probably keep going, because there’s more, but you get the point. If those in the game keep talking about the positive side effects, maybe we ought to listen to them.
There’s not, of course, a direct measurement for “is fatigued.” What we can do is show is just how often catchers are carrying a heavier load. This past season, 21 catchers took at least 400 plate appearances, the highest since 2014, and fifth-highest of the 27 full seasons in the 30-team era. Just three seasons ago, only 14 catchers did so — the fewest in a full season since 1995.
Again, it’s not as much as about the NL getting the DH as you’d think; the 13 catchers in the AL who got at least 400 plate appearances this year was tied for the highest of the 30-team era with 2005. The five who got to 500 were more than the AL had in the 2017-’21 span combined.
You can really see the shape of the trends like this, showing AL-only for DH-consistency simplicity.
From a peak in 2005 to a low in 2016-’17, the primary workload catchers seemed a dying breed. It was right about that time — after the 2016 season — that JJ Cooper at Baseball America published an article aptly titled “MLB Catchers’ Workloads Keep Decreasing,” because they were. (It’s worth noting, too, that at least in the American League, 2015, ‘16, ‘18, and ‘19 were some of the weakest-hitting catcher seasons.)
Obviously, this includes all of a catcher’s playing time, not just at catcher. Raleigh, for example, took nearly one-quarter of his plate appearances this year as a designated hitter. (He also hit considerably worse there, to the tune of 218 points of OPS.) Salvador Perez, too, has begun to add more time at first base to his resume. Then again, catchers have been doing that for years, and even Bench, in that 1974 season, took 20% of his plate appearances as a third baseman.
What’s more noteworthy were the personal and team marks set by individual catchers for time behind the plate. Realmuto, at 34 and seemingly entering his decline phase, led the Majors with 1,151 1/3 innings caught, not only a personal best and the most any Phillies backstop had received since Mike Lieberthal back in 1999, but the most any catcher has received since Yadier Molina nearly a decade ago, in 2016.
Five other catchers caught more innings in 2025 than their teams had had from a single catcher since 2016 or earlier. Last season, Raleigh caught more innings than any Mariner catcher since 2006, and Cincinnati’s Tyler Stephenson caught more than any Reds receiver had managed since, somehow, Joe Oliver back in 1993.
All catch with one knee down, it should go without saying, because almost everyone does.
Raleigh’s the standout here, given that he just had what was, by FanGraphs WAR, essentially tied for the second-best catching season in history, in a virtual dead heat with Bench’s 1972 and Mike Piazza’s 1997, behind only Buster Posey’s 2012. “Motion is lotion,” he famously said, recently, attempting to explain how staying active helps keep him whole.
Perhaps so. But he’s not alone, either. Raleigh caught 98 percent of his pitches with a knee down in each of the last two seasons, and the sport as a whole was at 95 percent. If that helps keep some of baseball’s biggest stars on the field, all the better. Raleigh, for his part, might not have made it to 60 homers if he’d been available for fewer plate appearances, which is to say “played as often as nearly every other catcher before him.”
Bob Brenly, a nine-year catching veteran and later World Series-winning manager, once said that “by the end of the season, I feel like a used car.” For Raleigh, and for many other modern catchers, that car is still running, deep into October.
