Almost immediately, Justin Turner could sense the bubbling frustration from Cal Raleigh.

A veteran slugger with a World Series ring and an NL Championship Series MVP on his résumé, the former Dodger arrived in Seattle just before the trade deadline in July 2024 and quickly began to form a connection with the Mariners catcher.

They talked next to the batting cage before every game, and Raleigh would pepper his new teammate with questions about his swing, his approach, his process — anything he could think of, really.

“I’m a better (expletive) hitter than this. I need to be better,” Turner remembered Raleigh telling him.

Those initial conversations helped nudge Raleigh on a trajectory that has brought him to the rarefied space he now occupies less than a year later. Raleigh has, simply, become the biggest new sensation in baseball and, suddenly, one of the game’s best hitters, too.

Baseball’s fascination with “Big Dumper” reached a new apex with Raleigh winning the MLB Home Run Derby on Monday, with his dad pitching to him and younger brother catching. On Tuesday night, Raleigh batted cleanup for the American League in the All-Star Game.

“I knew right away Cal was a special guy,” Turner said. “Two things: his desire to be great, and then he’s one of the toughest guys I’ve ever been around. Just seeing him play every day and play through some of the stuff he played with — you don’t see that all the time.”

Raleigh is doing things no catcher has done in the history of the sport. A career .218 hitter with a .740 OPS coming into this season, the switch-hitting slugger has vaulted into the A.L. MVP conversation with the Yankees’ Aaron Judge while mashing homers at a rate Ken Griffey Jr. never even achieved in Seattle.

If you were to start from scratch and design the archetype for the modern baseball swing — if you were to ask an AI machine to cull optimized launch, lift and pull data and spit out the ideal mold — the result would be something close to Raleigh’s swing right now.

Consider: No major league hitter over the past 16 seasons has hit the ball in the air as much as Raleigh is this year.

Consider: No major league hitter over the past five seasons has pulled the ball as much as Raleigh is this year.

The results: a major league-leading 38 homers and an OPS north of 1.000 (and, yes, a new $105 million contract signed in March that already looks like a steal for the Mariners).

Here’s the catch: Raleigh doesn’t think of himself as a modern hitter. He doesn’t step to the plate trying to launch the ball through the clouds and pull it off the foul pole.

Ask him and he’ll tell you he’s trying to hit a hard line drive at the center fielder’s head. It’s the combination of those competing ideologies — the optimal launch angle lift blended with an up-the-middle mindset — that has triggered Raleigh’s breakthrough.

To find it, Raleigh sought out various ideas in the offseason.

A decade ago, Turner became the face of the launch-angle revolution when he remade his swing in his late 20s and then resurrected his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Raleigh wanted to learn from Turner and Doug Latta, Turner’s longtime hitting coach. More than any mechanical swing adjustment, though, Raleigh said his biggest takeaways from those sessions centered more on the mental approach to the game.

“He wants to hear new ideas and he wants to learn, but he’s able to filter things out that maybe aren’t right for him,” Turner said.

Raleigh, it seems, has also found the perfect bat to match his swing. Most of his Mariners teammates hated the feel of the new “torpedo bat when they first experimented with it early this season, but Raleigh fell in love with it right away.

Rawlings, the bat manufacturer, has made two custom models for Raleigh — a balanced bat that he uses swinging left-handed, and a top-heavy one for his right-handed swing — and it just feels right. He doesn’t have a deeper explanation than that.

“I wish I had a better answer for you,” he said. “I just picked it up one day and I hit a home run — and I just kept using it.”

Mariners outfielder Luke Raley said of watching Raleigh, “When he walks up to the plate, you’re almost expecting him to hit a home run — and that’s not how baseball’s supposed to be.”

Raley added, “It’s just incredible what the guy’s been doing, and it’s almost extra exciting happening to Cal, because of what a great person he is, what a great teammate and leader. He deserves everything that’s coming his way.”

When the Mariners took Raleigh in the third round of the 2018 draft, they weren’t sure what they had. Industrywide, scouts were split on Raleigh’s pro potential, and MLB.com didn’t even include him among the top-10 catching prospects.

“I was a little nervous,” said Scott Hunter , now the club’s VP of amateur scouting. Mariners scouts assigned Raleigh a “50” grade on the standard 20-80 scouting scale (50 representing an average major leaguer).

“If I sat here and told you we knew he’d be this good, that’d be a lie,” Hunter said in a recent interview. “We thought he might be a really good backup with a chance to be an everyday guy.”

These days, Raleigh is everywhere. The Mariners PR department has been flooded with interview requests from national media outlets over the past month, and the club made a big marketing push on his behalf during voting for the All-Star Game.

“You could just tell he was different from the get-go,” said Michael Sadler, who worked with Raleigh at the Mariners’ Single-A affilate in Modesto in 2019 as a strength and conditioning coach, and is now the director of sports performance at Dakota Wesleyan University. “You could tell his determination and his grit and his willingness to do just about whatever it took to be the best, and he’s putting it on display right now.

“He’s living his dream. I’m just really proud of him and the person that he’s become, and I really think it’s only going to get better from here.”