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.
