Their playoff hopes dashed, most of the Mariners players quickly and quietly dispersed Saturday evening to various corners of the home clubhouse.
Cal Raleigh was one of the few to stick around. And in an otherwise silent room, the Mariners catcher spoke up and spoke his mind.
“We’ve got to become a better team. Straight up,” Raleigh told a group of reporters gathered in front of his locker. “We’ve been right at this 90-game [win] mark for a few years now. We’ve just got to become better. Something’s got to change.
“I don’t think by any means we’re a bad team this year, but it’s not where we want to be. We want to be getting to the World Series; we want to be making the playoffs every single year. In order to do that, some things have to change, and it starts with the players here in the clubhouse.”
The Mariners’ 26-year-old catcher — who played nearly every day over the final six weeks of the season after veteran Tom Murphy went down with a broken thumb — has emerged as the outspoken leader for this young Mariners roster. It was Raleigh who spoke up after a series loss to the Washington Nationals in late June, effectively calling out teammates to pick it up.
The Mariners did pick it up — considerably so — after the All-Star break, surging into first place in the AL West by late August.
It didn’t last. They are 11-17 in September after Saturday’s loss.
Raleigh pointed generally to “small things” the Mariners weren’t able to execute.
“I know you guys hear a lot about the numbers and about the analytics,” he said. “But there’s a lot of things that you can’t quantify. And I think that we’ve got to get better in that area for sure.”
Raleigh lamented the trade of closer Paul Sewald to Arizona at the trade deadline.
“I thought we were [better than this]. I really did,” Raleigh said. “I thought we were going to have a lot better year. I thought adding some bats was going to help, but losing Paul at the trade deadline definitely hurt. And that was a big spot in our season.”
As Raleigh spoke, the Texas Rangers, having secured their first postseason berth since 2016 with a 6-1 romp of the Mariners, were celebrating in the T-Mobile Park visitors’ clubhouse.
Amid that celebration, Texas’ Corey Seager told reporters: “The job’s not necessarily done yet. But just the resilience of this club all year, the vision the front office saw, the way the owners have gone out and done everything we asked them to do, it’s special and this is what happens.”
Raleigh made a direct reference to the Rangers and their organization’s willingness to spend on free agents.
“You look over at the other locker room right there, and they’ve added more [in free agency] than anybody else, and you saw where it got them this year,” Raleigh said. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, that’s for sure. But going out and getting those big names — people who have done it; people have been there; people who are leaders; people who have shown time and time again that they can be successful in this league — is definitely going to help this clubhouse and help this team.”
He said the organization needs to make a strong commitment to winning.
“We have to,” Raleigh said. “… We have to do that to keep up. We’ve done a great job of growing some players here within the farm system, but sometimes you’ve got to go out and you have to buy. And that’s just the name of the game.
“We’ll see what happens this offseason. Hopefully we can add some players and become a better team.”
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