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Jesse Rogers
ATLANTA — Seattle Mariners star and MLB home run leader Cal Raleigh became the first catcher to win the All-Star Home Run Derby as he outlasted young Tampa Bay Rays infielder Junior Caminero in the final on Monday night to take home the title.
Raleigh hit 18 home runs to Caminero’s 15 in the final round. He joins Ken Griffey Jr. as the only two Mariners to win the event.
“Usually the guy that’s leading the league in homers doesn’t win the whole thing,” Raleigh said. “That’s as surprising to me as anybody else.”
Raleigh was pitched to by his father, Todd, former coach of Tennessee and Western Carolina. His younger brother Todd Raleigh Jr. did the catching.
“Just to do it with my family was awesome,” Raleigh said.
Raleigh was almost eliminated in Round 1 when he and Brent Rooker tied with 17 home runs, but the Mariners catcher won the tiebreaker by the slimmest of margins as his longest home run traveled 470.61 feet to Rooker’s 470.53.
Caminero, Raleight, Oneil Cruz and Byron Buxton all advanced past a Round 1 that featured the lowest total in over a decade after Yankees infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit only three.
“It was fun,” Chisholm said afterward. “I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed every second of it. You can’t ask for a better feeling. I’m still an All-Star. I still hit in the Home Run Derby. Who could ask for a better experience than that?”
Cruz produced the highlight of the first round when he blasted a 513-foot home run, the longest of the event. He’s the sixth player to hit a Derby HR of 500-plus feet since Statcast started tracking it in 2016. He’s only the second to do it outside of Coors Field.
Cruz averaged 447 feet in Round 1 but got beat by Raleigh in the semis when the latter hit 19. Raleigh wowed the crowd when he hit both left-handed and right-handed during his first round, blasting 10 from the left side and another seven from the right side. He’s the first switch-hitter to win the event.
Meanwhile, Rooker expressed confusion over his final moments in Round 1, where each player was given 40 pitches and 3:00 minutes to hit home runs.
“They told me before I went up there that I could take two pitches, but I didn’t know when they told me that there were only 40 balls already in the crate,” Rooker said. “So I took two pitches that didn’t count, but when we went to do the round, there was only 38 remaining. So we got down to having two pitches with five seconds left and they’re out of baseballs.”
Raleigh leads MLB with 38 regular-season home runs.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
