Cal Raleigh breaks the curse: through pain and pure relief 
Tuesday night in Houston was a full-blown roller coaster for Cal Raleigh. The Mariners catcher first endured the kind of nightmare no player wants, taking a foul ball straight to the groin in the seventh inning. But if that brutal shot was the jolt he needed, it also snapped an ugly 0-for-38 streak just minutes later. Even with the pain, Raleigh was all smiles after lining a single to right-centre in Seattle’s runaway 10-2 win over the Astros.
A rookie-style celebration for the “Big Dumper”
Seattle were piling on the runs, but Raleigh’s hit stole the show. His teammates treated it like he’d just picked up his first big-league knock. Bryan Woo was waving towels like a man possessed, while Josh Naylor went full wind-up merchant, grabbing a fake ball from a bag on the bench and handing it over as a souvenir of the great escape. Raleigh, who hadn’t picked up a hit since April 27, was getting uncomfortably close to the franchise’s low-water mark of futility, an 0-for-42 stretch owned by Jarred Kelenic.
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The full-uniform shower ritual: when superstition takes over
Raleigh was ready to try anything to shake off the slump. Bryan Woo revealed that the catcher had taken a shower fully dressed in his uniform after Monday’s game, on Logan Gilbert’s advice. Desperate stuff, but it seems to have done the trick, with Raleigh even adding a second hit in the eighth inning and turning a 15-day drought into his sixth multi-hit game of the season. “Sometimes you’ve just got to stop thinking about mechanics and numbers and start fighting,” he admitted after the game.
A collective exhale for Seattle
Beyond the individual performance, the whole Mariners clubhouse could finally breathe again. Sitting at 21-22, the team has been scrapping to get back above .500 since the season began. Raleigh, last year’s American League MVP runner-up, is still in a tricky spot with a .166 batting average and 55 strikeouts, but this could be a turning point for the group. If the Mariners play half as loose as they celebrated their catcher’s single, the rest of the trip in Texas could get very interesting.
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