DETROIT – “What are the odds?”
Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh shook his head at the improbability. He was talking about the absurd truth that his 61st home run of the year was caught in a crowd of 41,525 people by a Mariners fan wearing a homemade “Dump 61 Here” shirt. A fan who grew up in Washington rooting for the Mariners and now works at—wait for it—a Las Vegas casino. A fan sitting 391 feet away in the opposite field, a distance the other way Raleigh had reached only three times all year.
“That,” Raleigh said, “is crazy.”
Raleigh might well have wondered “What are the odds” that Seattle, the only franchise never to make the World Series, is one win away from playing for a spot in the Fall Classic. (To be specific, at the start of the year the odds of such a thing happening were +1,100, worse than at +900 in 2024 and 2023, when they failed to make the playoffs.)
And what were the odds Raleigh would join Yankee sluggers Aaron Judge, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth as the only players to homer in the postseason after hitting 60 homers in the regular season?
And what were the odds the Mariners would win three games in one year against All-Planet pitcher Tarik Skubal, including a pivotal American League division series Game 2 on Sunday?
Mariners’ secret sauce is the oldest formula for success
It turns out, all the good karma around the Mariners these days has little to do with long odds and everything to do with one of the oldest, surest tenets of winning baseball: pitching. In a game gone crazy over spin and pitch shapes, Mariners pitchers throw more strikes (65.3%), more fastballs (55.5%) and more pitches when ahead in the count (31.2%) than any staff in the American League.
They are flat-out dominating a Detroit Tigers team that doesn’t have nearly the lineup depth or bat-to-ball skills to take on the fury of Seattle’s here-it-is-try-to-hit-it pitchers.
Seattle Game 3 starter Logan Gilbert took the baton from Luis Castillo, who took the baton from George Kirby. In an 8-4 win made close only in garbage time, Gilbert struck out seven batters over six solid innings, tying a Mariners postseason record for most strikeouts without a walk, joining Castillo and Randy Johnson.
In three games the Mariners have held the Tigers to a .165 batting average while striking out 35 batters in 29 innings. Ever since Kerry Carpenter homered in the fifth inning of Game 1, the Tigers have gone homerless in 95 consecutive plate appearances, getting outhomered 5–0. All that with the Mariners’ best starter this year, Bryan Woo, not even on the roster because of injury.
“The most impressive thing about this staff is how crazy-a– tight they are,” said Seattle center fielder Julio Rodriguez. “I mean, they share information together, they eat together, they train together, they do everything together. Listen, they’ve got good [stuff]. Start there. But the way they compete every day and push each other is what helps them to be great.”
Said Raleigh, “I know every team talks about being aggressive and controlling counts. But these guys take it to another level. It makes my job a lot easier.”
Gilbert threw only 22 fastballs, his third fewest of the year, but bamboozled Detroit hitters with a magic show of sliders and splitters so impressive you thought at any moment he would pull a quarter out of the ear of some wide-eyed Tigers hitter. He threw 20 splitters. The Tigers put none of them in play. They swung six times at his menacing butterfly and missed it five times, managing one measly foul ball.
This is a staff with the best pure stuff this side of the Dodgers. Gilbert’s splitter is the hardest single pitch to hit in baseball among starters (.115 opponents’ batting average) and has the lowest spin rate among all splitters (727 rpm). He has the longest extension in baseball (7.5 feet in front of the rubber, matching Tyler Glasnow and Jake Misiorowski).
Castillo throws the second highest percentage of fastballs in MLB (68.2%) while living up to his nickname, (The Rock), given to him years ago by an impressed Reds teammate who watched him throw one bullpen and said, “Man, you are throwing rocks!”
Woo is number one at chucking fastballs (72.8%). Kirby has the greatest strikeout-to-walk rate in history for any starter four years into their career (6.88). Closer Andres Muñoz has the single toughest pitch to hit in the sport, his slider (.103 opponents’ BA). Matt Brash throws more sliders than all but two pitchers (60.6%).
On and on it goes. The Mariners are a pure stuff factory, a staff of outliers. But everything works from a country hardball, old school perspective. No team in baseball throws more first-pitch fastballs than Seattle.
What are the odds? The Mariners are true believers in the 94% Theory: when a pitcher throws an 0–0 pitch in the strike zone, 94% of the time the batter gets out or the pitch is a strike. Get ahead, then go after chase swings. It’s a formula that the Tigers are poorly equipped to defeat with all their swing-and-miss. It’s a team that pinch-hits for its No. 3 hitter.
Raleigh’s first 2025 postseason homer lands with a friendly face
The Tigers also just don’t have the depth of elite arms that the Mariners possess. That was apparent in Game 3 when Seattle just kept tacking on runs, including the homer by Raleigh with a runner at second in the ninth.
“Honestly, I was just trying to get the guy over and I was able to get extended a little more through it,” he said.
The ball bounced in the Seattle bullpen and into the hands of Jameson Turner, a supervisor at the Fontainebleau Casino in Vegas who only the day before bought a ticket for Game 3 and flew here. He had the day off Tuesday and asked for Wednesday off as well.
Turner made his teal “Dump 61 Here” shirt himself, ironing on the vinyl graphics. He made the shirt for the last series of the regular season, when he bought a ticket in the right field seats in Seattle hoping to see Raleigh add to his 60 homers.
He brought the shirt with him here but could only find a seat in left field.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, well maybe he'll just knock a miracle one back there,’” Turner said. “And I guess that's what happened … When he came up, maybe he saw me and hit it right to me. It was Babe Ruth there.”
When Turner caught the homer, the Mariners relievers laughed themselves upon seeing his shirt.
“Yeah, they were loving it,” Turner said. “They were just all giving me thumbs up, like they couldn't believe it either.”
The kicker: once Turner caught No. 61, he peeled off his shirt to reveal a like one underneath, only this one read, “Dump 62 Here.” After the game, Turner got to meet his modern Babe Ruth in a hallway outside the Mariners’ clubhouse. Raleigh, clad in shorts and a T-shirt, autographed his shirt.
Major league baseball has been played in Seattle for 50 years, starting with the Pilots in 1969 and the Mariners in 1977. Never has the city seen the World Series. It is the longest drought for a city in baseball. The Mariners have not reached even the league championship series since 2001. But on nights like this, when godwinks happen like Raleigh’s 61st home run landing in the mitts of a Mariners fan wearing 61 in a sea of Tigers fans, it becomes easy for any fan of the team, not just a Vegas casino worker, to believe the odds are not so crazy.
“Well, I grew up in Washington,” Turner said. “I went to games in the Kingdome when I was a little guy and I've been following them more and more as they've been winning more and more. So, it’s been 24 years since we got to [the ALCS], so now it's pretty exciting.”
The story of No. 61 reads like a fable or a cute bedtime story. But to understand why the Mariners are one win away from playing for the pennant requires baseball boilerplate material: to borrow from Castillo, they throw rocks.