Cal Raleigh is hitting .162 in 2026. Michael Jordan, in his one and only season of professional baseball, hit .202. Both numbers are real — and the comparison went viral this week. But there’s one detail that changes everything: Jordan was hitting against Double-A pitching at age 30, with exactly one year of organized baseball under his belt. Raleigh faces the best pitchers on the planet every single night, and he’s doing it while coming back from an oblique injury.
The Tweet That’s Right and Wrong at the Same Time
The math is clean. Raleigh carries a .162 average through 82 games this season. Jordan finished 1994 with a .202 mark over 127 games with the Birmingham Barons, the Chicago White Sox‘s Double-A affiliate. A higher average is a higher average — no argument there.
What is worth arguing is the level of competition. Jordan was facing Double-A arms at 30 years old, having never played organized baseball as an adult, with a single year of preparation. Raleigh is in the big leagues, going up against the most dominant pitchers alive. Comparing those two numbers as if they exist in the same universe is like saying a college sprinter is faster than Usain Bolt because they ran different distances.
What Raleigh’s Average Isn’t Telling You
Batting average is the easiest baseball stat to understand and one of the easiest to misread. For a catcher like Raleigh — whose value runs through power and elite defense behind the plate — a low AVG in a comeback season tells you almost nothing. His advanced numbers in 2026 tell a completely different story:
- His xwOBA sits at .295, meaning the quality of contact he’s making should be producing more results than the scoreboard shows.
- His Barrel % is 13.1% — more than one in every eight balls he puts in play carries home-run-level exit velocity and launch angle.
- With 12 home runs and 43 RBI in just 82 games, he remains one of the most dangerous catchers in the league, on a solid production pace for a return season.
Jordan, meanwhile, finished 1994 with a .556 OPS in Double-A and 114 strikeouts in 497 at-bats. He never reached the majors — not for lack of effort, but because baseball is brutally hard, and making it to MLB from scratch at that age is nearly impossible for anyone.
The Man Who Broke the Catcher Home Run Record Ten Months Ago
Framing Raleigh’s 2026 without mentioning his 2025 would be a mistake. Last year, the catcher nicknamed Big Dumper hit .247 with 60 home runs, 125 RBI, and 110 runs scored in 159 games. He shattered the all-time home run record for catchers — surpassing Salvador Pérez’s 48 in 2021 — and broke the switch-hitter record, passing Mickey Mantle’s 54 from 1961. He won the Silver Slugger, made his first All-Star team, and took home the Home Run Derby title.
That’s the real context. Raleigh isn’t an average player having an average year. He’s the best power-hitting catcher of his generation navigating a difficult season while recovering from an oblique injury. A batting average can’t explain any of that.
Jordan, for his part, was one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century — in basketball. His time with the Barons was a genuine, brave, and genuinely unprecedented experiment. But his baseball numbers don’t lie: a .202 average in Double-A with over 100 strikeouts wasn’t projecting a path to the majors, and he knew it. In March 1995, he returned to basketball and won three more championships with the Bulls.
The viral comparison is funny precisely because it mashes two contexts that have no business being in the same sentence. And that, paradoxically, is the best possible argument for why batting average alone might be the most misleading number in baseball.
