By Dave Sheinin

Welcome to The Sports Moment, your guide to the buzziest stories in sports. I’m Dave Sheinin, a sports enterprise reporter for The Post, and I’m thrilled to be pinch-hitting for Ava Wallace, who is off to London to cover Wimbledon. This week, a home run barrage that can no longer be ignored.

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It shouldn’t be possible for a guy with the nickname The Big Dumper — the origin-story of which is every bit as juvenile as you would imagine — to sneak up on anyone. 

But as the Major League Baseball season reaches its halfway point, with all 30 teams hitting the 81-game mark by this weekend, there is a distinct sense that the country is finally waking up to the sheer wonder and spectacle that is Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh. Thirty-two homers before the end of June, it turns out, will do that.

What Raleigh has been doing — in constructing what is, at bare minimum, the greatest half-season in history by a catcher — can no longer be ignored. Consider: using FanGraphs’ version of wins above replacement, there has never been a 10-WAR season posted by a catcher in baseball history. San Francisco’s Buster Posey, in 2012, came closest at 9.8, followed by Cincinnati’s Johnny Bench (9.2) in 1972 and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Mike Piazza (9.1) in 1997.

But the switch-hitting Raleigh, through Wednesday, was already at 5.4 WAR in the Mariners’ first 79 games of 2025 — which puts him on pace for 11.1 by season’s end. That’s a mark reached by only 11 position players in history, all but two of whom (Barry Bonds and Aaron Judge) are in the Hall of Fame.

The Big Dumper. (Stephen Brashear/AP)

If traditional counting stats are more your thing, Raleigh’s 32 homers through Wednesday had him on a pace for 66 — which would smash Judge’s 2022 American League record of 62, as well as Mickey Mantle’s 1961 record by a switch hitter (54).

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Put simply: Raleigh, 28, is in the midst of a historic season — made even more so because of the position he plays. In today’s game, catchers simply aren’t bred to hit like this; through Wednesday, he had more than twice as many homers as the second-most-prolific catcher this year, Colorado’s Hunter Goodman (14). The fact Raleigh is rated as an elite defensive backstop, earning both a Gold Glove and Platinum Glove last season, makes it even more remarkable. He didn’t exactly come out of nowhere — he hit 34 homers and drove in 100 runs in 2024 — but nobody could have predicted he would be putting up an OPS this season (1.039) that is nearly 300 points above his career average (.740) entering this season.

You might think East coast bias in sports was a thing of the past, no longer relevant in today’s hyper-connected, 24-hour-news-cycle world. And true, playing on the West coast hasn’t seemed to harm Shohei Ohtani’s global visibility. But Ohtani, for various reasons, is an outlier. Because the majority of the Mariners’ games take place in the Pacific time zone, fans east of the Mississippi, to their detriment, have missed much of Raleigh’s nightly assault on the baseball — and on baseball history.

Here’s a wee bit of advice: Stay up late once in a while, and tune in to The Big Dumper. Quite literally, you have never seen anyone like him.

No multiple choice for this week’s trivia question, which is a tricky one: Can you name the seven FBS college football programs whose nicknames don’t end in “s” and don’t contain a color? 

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Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!

Rodeo clown JJ Harrison. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

The Post’s stellar profile last weekend of rodeo clown JJ Harrison stood out for both Roman Stubbs’s exquisite storytelling and Toni Sandys’s gorgeous photos. The lead shot of Harrison putting white clown makeup over his weather-beaten face, with the cloud of white dust rising up to his back cowboy hat, is a work of art.

But days after it was published, what has stuck with me — in a nightmare-fuel sort of way — is the embedded video, roughly a third of the way through the story, of a bull named Party Bus. To a soundtrack of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Party Bus jumps the fence at a rodeo in Sisters, Ore., where he eventually (off-camera) sent three people to the hospital.

Oh, Canada. (Julio Cortez/AP)

Three.

When Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was named MVP of the NBA Finals on Sunday night, it gave our neighbors to the north an unprecedented trifecta: Never before in history could it be said that three reigning finals MVP across the major North American sports leagues were Canadian. Those three: Gilgeous-Alexander (NBA), Sam Bennett of the Florida Panthers (NHL) and Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers (MLB). 

(OK, perhaps Freeman requires an asterisk, as he is a dual citizen whose parents were both born in Canada, but who was born and raised in California. In international competition, he has chosen to play for Canada — in tribute to his mother, Rosemary, who died of melanoma when Freeman was 10.)

Aryna Sabalenka: One of the many stars Ava will be covering from Wimbledon next week. (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

All times Eastern.