ATLANTA — The legend of Cal Raleigh just keeps getting bigger.

The Mariners catcher, already MLB’s breakout star this year, burnished his meteoric ascendency into the sport’s elite further by winning the 2025 MLB Home Run Derby at Truist Park on Monday. Already leading the league with 38 home runs and 82 runs batted in and doing so with an everyman vibe, Raleigh prevailed over the Rays’ Junior Caminero in the final 18–15. 

Raleigh, known as “Big Dumper,” will claim a $1 million prize, adding to his 2025 compensation of $11 million in salary and signing bonus. 

The switch-hitting Raleigh hit from both sides of the plate during the Derby, becoming the first winner to do so, as well as the first catcher. He was the betting favorite entering the competition.  

Caminero will get a runner-up prize of $500,000, near his $764,1000 salary for the entire 2025 season. 

Six other competitors—the Twins’ Byron Buxton, the Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr., the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz, Braves’ Matt Olson, Brent Rooker of the A’s, and the Nationals’ James Wood—will earn $150,000 each. 

Raleigh made it to the semifinals by beating Rooker in a historically narrow tiebreaker in which his longest home run went just a single inch further than Rooker’s. Such a slim victory nears the margin of error in MLB’s ball-tracking technology that is generally around half an inch. 

Cruz, who has been lighting up MLB’s Statcast with top exit velocities since entering the league in 2021, cleared the ballpark during the first-round with a 513-foot shot to dead center field. The bomb, leaving his bat at 118 miles per hour, earned him an additional $100,000 prize for the longest homer of the competition. 

Star ESPN personality Pat McAfee, meanwhile, built upon a live broadcast of his show Monday from The Battery by leading on-field introductions of each of the eight Derby competitors. McAfee also administered the MLB All-Star Game press conference earlier in the day, awkwardly deflecting a question about a Georgia state voter law that led to the relocation of the 2021 event in Atlanta. 

ATLANTA — In a sport filled with players built like superheroes and carrying themselves as such, the catcher currently taking over the sport still sees himself as a regular guy and goes by the self-deprecating nickname “Big Dumper.”

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, in many ways, is the man of the moment in baseball, surprising many including himself. His 38 home runs before the MLB All-Star Game lead the league and stand just one behind the league record for this point in the season. His 82 runs batted in also top the majors. But unlike his new contemporaries at the top of the sport’s pecking order of stars, players like the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, Raleigh still considers himself an everyday person.

“Judge is a monster. He’s a beast. They’re both great players. I’m just a guy from North Carolina, right down the road from here,” Raleigh said of Judge and Ohtani in an exclusive interview with Front Office Sports. “It’ll be fun to continue to compete with those guys. Hopefully, I can keep up and hold my own.”

As the legend of Raleigh grows, so, too, does corporate America’s embrace of him. Raleigh is signed with T-Mobile, and participated early Monday in an event at the mobile carrier’s Club Magenta fan experience at The Battery, the mixed-use development that surrounds Truist Park, site of this year’s All-Star Game. Washington state–based Scuttlebutt Brewing, meanwhile, will unveil Big Dumper Beer next month.

“It connects us with the fans, which is what it’s all about, and helps promote the game of baseball, which is what we’re all trying to do,” Raleigh says of his rising commercial profile. 

The fifth-year switch-hitter is the starting catcher for the American League in Tuesday’s All-Star Game and will bat cleanup. On Monday, he became the first catcher to win the Home Run Derby, providing another big dose of national publicity for a player otherwise competing in the relative anonymity of Seattle. 

He did so with his father pitching to him and his 15-year-old younger brother, whom he called “Little Dumper,” catching.

Raleigh, meanwhile, is now arguably one of the more underpaid players in MLB, as he signed a six-year, $105 million extension not long after switching agents from Scott Boras to Excel Sports Management, and will get $11 million of that this season between salary and signing bonus. The contract, however, was designed to give Raleigh security on multiple fronts, particularly the ability to stay in Seattle, where he’s intent on helping build a winner.

Backstories

Originally from rural Cullowhee, N.C., with a population of 7,300, Raleigh’s ascent has been far from conventional. Though he’s the son of a baseball coach and was a standout player at Florida State, he spent three years in the minors before reaching the big leagues, and another two seasons often struggling to become an impact player. 

“I wasn’t expecting this, this first half,” Raleigh said in a major understatement. “I obviously had confidence, as a baseball player, you have to, but to be where I’m at, I’m very grateful. I’m in a pretty cool spot.”

The “Big Dumper” nickname was coined by former teammate Jarred Kelenic, referring to Raleigh’s considerable posterior.

“It is quite the nickname,” Raleigh says. “It didn’t catch on at first, but I’ve always had a big butt … and once I started playing a little better, fans in Seattle thought it was awesome.”

Raleigh, meanwhile, has also expanded his use of torpedo bats this season. After starting with the oddly shaped, but legal, models strictly from the left side, he now uses them from both sides—though with slightly different weights.

Several potential records are well within reach for Raleigh this year, including the single-season home run mark for a switch-hitter, the most by a catcher, and the Mariners’ single-season record, held by Mickey Mantle, Salvador Perez, and Ken Griffey Jr., respectively. 

“I’m just going to try to keep it going,” he said.

ATLANTA — MLB is awash in a series of business boosts and positive developments, between attendance rising, each of its national TV partners posting audience increases, and other, in-house outlets such as the MLB Network and MLB.TV garnering record engagement. 

All of these markers continue, or in some cases, accelerate the resurgent energy the sport has seen since the early 2023 introduction of the pitch clock, which played a key role in introducing a livelier, more action-filled form of play. 

So why is the league so insistent on potentially tearing that down? Such is the question that the MLB Players Association is asking. 

Speaking before Monday’s MLB Home Run Derby, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said he was disappointed to see labor talk dominate so far ahead of the December 2026 expiration of the current pact. 

“The game is in a great place. It appears to be moving in the right direction. More attendance and more butts in the seats than we’ve had in a long time. More people are watching and streaming the games than we’ve had,” Clark said. “You’d think there’d be an opportunity about how to build instead of how to go backwards.”

Of course, the MLBPA is responsible for some of that escalation in rhetoric, recently calling out what they see as the league’s push to institute a salary cap, but the union said it is signaling alarms to help ensure that players are informed on the developing situation. 

“[The owners] obviously have their interests, and those interests aren’t much different than the interests they have for the last three or four or five decades at this point,” Clark said.  

Dividing Lines

Clark is expected to revisit many of the same themes Tuesday morning when he meets with the Baseball Writers Association of America, to be immediately followed by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.

For his part, Manfred said large-scale change is needed, and that current MLBPA leadership is not necessarily on board. Because of that, he’s been meeting with individual players to make the league’s case. 

“The strategy is to get directly to the players,” Manfred said at a recent investor day for the publicly traded Braves. “I don’t think the leadership of this union is anxious to lead the way to change. So we need to energize the workforce in order to get them familiar with or supportive of the idea that maybe changing the system could be good for everybody.”

The union’s objection to a salary cap extends the same core objection the organization has held for nearly its entire existence. It also continues to point to recent issues in cap-based systems in other major sports, such as frequent cap-driven roster cuts and contract restructurings in the NFL.

“Those other situations enter every conversation we have when we educate players on what a salary-cap system is and what it isn’t,” Clark said. “It fundamentally erodes guaranteed contracts. It pits players directly against one another. … It is the opposite of what you often hear it described as.”

ATLANTA — Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin wishes there were a hard salary cap in college football, but he doesn’t think the start of the revenue-sharing era is accomplishing that goal.

“That’s what we attempted,” Kiffin said in response to a Front Office Sports question at SEC media days. “Doesn’t seem like that’s working very well.”

Last week, Colorado coach Deion Sanders led calls at Big 12 media days for college football to implement an NFL-style salary cap. College athletic departments are now allowed to share up to $20.5 million with athletes, but complications around new NIL (name, image, and likeness) regulations have many coaches worried that spending at top programs will remain unrestrained.

“I think it’s obvious people aren’t staying within that cap,” Kiffin said Monday. 

Many schools attempted to front-load NIL payments to top players before new rules began July 1, to supplement limits imposed by revenue-sharing. It could be several years before the new NIL landscape is in a properly regulated state.

“We’ve tried to follow the guidelines because that’s what we were told we needed to do,” Kiffin said. “I’m not saying they’re wrong for doing it; I’m not calling anybody out. If the system isn’t solid enough to prevent that, then we really don’t have a system. So you’re not operating on a salary cap.”

The newly created College Sports Commission is leading efforts to curb “pay-for-play” NIL deals. Many Power 4 schools are expected to allocate roughly 75% of their revenue-sharing total to football programs, and it is anticipated that the $20.5 million cap figure will grow incrementally in the coming years.