Cal Raleigh, The College Years: Solidifying Florida State as Catcher U.

A magical season including the 2025 Home Run Derby championship began with a standout career at Florida State.

Cal Raleigh’s MLB Home Run Derby title added a historic milestone to a season on pace to smash a variety of records. “Big Dumper” is the first catcher to win the All-Star Weekend event, providing a fitting midseason footnote on a campaign in which Raleigh should obliterate Salvador Perez’s mark of 48 home runs in 2021, most-ever by a catcher in a season.

With 38 bombs at the Break — most by a Mariner at this juncture, bypassing Ken Griffey Jr.’s 35 in a 56-homer 1998 campaign — Cal Raleigh will head into the second half just 17 shy of breaking Mickey Mantle’s record of 54 in 1961, the peak for a switch hitter.

Who knows? If he continues to swing as he did in the first half, Cal Raleigh could very well chase down Aaron Judge’s American League-record 62 home-run season. He’ll face resistance from Judge himself, who heads into the All-Star Game with 35 dingers.

A home-run chase akin to 1998 — and hopefully without the bad after-taste of ‘98 — would be great for baseball. It might also bring back ESPN’s live look-ins during at-bats overlapping with football season, which during Judge’s AL-record pursuit in 2022 provided unintentionally high comedy from college football geeks on Twitter upset they missed a punt during Tennessee-UAB. It’s a shame (not really) that particular social-media platform died later the same year, but that’s a topic for a future newsletter.

I suspect checking in on Cal Raleigh might engender less outrage among the football-posting set, anyway, and especially among Florida State fans. While the outlook for the Seminoles coming off of a historically rotten 2024 football season is murky, Florida State alum Big Dumper gives the fan base something to cheer for.

Raleigh debuted at Florida State in 2016, just eight years after Buster Posey wrapped up his tenure in Tallahassee.

Side note, but regardless of how Raleigh’s career goes beyond 2025, this season is so historic that combined with Posey’s surefire Hall of Fame candidacy, Florida State can pretty safely be called Catcher U. of the last 50 years. Remarkably, three of Florida State’s six alumni to appear in the Midsummer Classic played the position, with San Diego Padres legend Terry Kennedy repping the Friars in three All-Star Games (and Baltimore Orioles once).

Before becoming a Major League All-Star, Kennedy drove in 122 runs and homered 32 times during his three seasons at Florida State. Per the FSU athletic website, Kennedy’s 21 homers in 1976 set the program record and are eight more than Cal Raleigh hit in his most prolific power campaign as a Seminole.

Raleigh’s best batting season at FSU came in his 2018 finale, when he homered 13 times to punctuate a .326 average and whopping 1.030 OPS.

The season, and Big Dumper’s college career, ended unceremoniously, however: Florida State dropped back-to-back 7-6 and 3-2 decisions to Samford and Mississippi State to bow out of the NCAA Baseball Tournament, with the Seminoles surrendering three ninth-inning runs in the latter elimination game.

Florida State did exact a measure of revenge against Samford three months later, at least, valiantly battling back from a fourth-quarter deficit.

While needing a late-game rally to overcome Samford could be classified as the lowest point of the extremely short-lived Willie Taggart era, the program’s actual low point came four months later with the infamous “Do Something” Martin Luther King Jr. tweet.

But I’m getting off-topic. Back to Cal Raleigh!

His 2018 postseason was forgettable, going 2-of-9 in Florida State’s two losses; hardly an appropriate conclusion to an All-American season and certainly not a prelude to his breakout MLB success.

Raleigh was markedly better in the 2017 postseason, when he accomplished a feat that eluded Kennedy in his Seminole career with a run to the College World Series. Big Dumper also eclipsed Buster Posey by scoring a win in Omaha, with Posey’s 2008 Seminoles dropping out with two straight losses.

Eventual runner-up LSU beat Raleigh’s Florida State team twice, but sandwiched between was a 6-4 win over Cal State Fullerton in which he drove in a run. Raleigh capped his 2017 season homering in Florida State’s elimination loss to LSU, concluding an impressive run in which he delivered a hit in every Seminoles postseason contest.