What's The Matter With Robinson Cano?

Unfairly or not, baseball players tend to be defined by a single, specific thing. Prince Fielder is his ESPN The Magazine photo shoot. Johnny Damon is the dude who used a lot of conditioner. Alex Rodriguez, who was Mike Trout before Mike Trout was Mike Trout, is the steroid-using liar. Fortunately for Robinson Cano, his association isn't intrinsically negative, although some will perceive it that way. He'll always be the $240 million ex-Yankee in Seattle. If he plays well over the decade of his contract and the Mariners have some playoff success, the stories about Cano will be good ones. If his play falls off in his thirties, as it has for so many second baseman before him, he'll be the free agent disaster in Seattle.

We are in year two of Cano's decade-long deal with the Mariners and while the first season was far from perfect, things objectively went pretty well. Cano put up his typical five win season, though with a little more defense and a little less hitting than in previous seasons; his teammates were mostly not very good. The result was the result. But this season things have been different.

The Mariners are still not in playoff position, that has not changed. But Cano's production has gone from a five-win player—an All-Star level performance, for anti-WAR types—to…well, nothing. To date, Cano has been worth less than no wins this season, which is to say he has been less useful than, say, Elliot Johnson or Scott Sizemore or any number of other definitionally replacement-level goofballs presently riding buses to their next game. That's not what Seattle wants from a player in the second year of a deal that will pay him $24 million every year until 2023, when The Rock will be President.

Now to the obvious part: we are two months into a season that is six plus months long. There is time for things to change, and things will change because in baseball things are always different after September than they are in early June. But that's not to discount what has happened so far. It is significant in that it's the only bit of this season that has unfolded so far. It means something. Fortunately for Cano, not everything.

But also something is wrong here, although it's not entirely clear what that is. Sometimes players swing at worse pitches as they age, or lose their foot speed, or their hand-eye coordination slips just enough to lose power. Any of those things could be happening to Cano as he enters his early thirties, a time when most players' skills begin to erode. Or it could just be a mechanical issue, and Cano is holding his hands wrong or striding at the wrong time during the pitch. So what is it? After much study I'm prepared to say this, definitively: I don't know.

I could tell you he's walking much less and striking out much more, but those are results. It's not helpful, for example, for someone to tell me to write better. Great, I'd say. How? Cano already knows walks are good and strikeouts are bad; he knows he should work towards one and avoid the other. Knowledge of the rules isn't the issue. What's happening is happening.

I could tell you Cano is missing more often when he swings at breaking pitches than he ever has before in his career. That's maybe more significant, but is Cano seeing more breaking pitches than ever before in his career? Not really. The results vary, but there doesn't seem to be a significant alteration in how Cano is being pitched or the pitches he's seen this season. As usual, most pitchers attack Cano low and away. If they miss over the plate he makes them pay and if they don't he sometimes makes them pay anyway. Perhaps he's seen a similar number of curveballs, but the curveballs he's seen have been much better in quality. That's possible, though unlikely. This is likely more a symptom than the actual sickness.

I could tell you (and am!) that he's hitting the ball softer than he ever has previously. Cano's average batted ball velocity is 150th in baseball, which lands him behind David DeJesus, Howie Kendrick, and Dan Uggla, and just ahead of Mike Zunino, Tyler Flowers, and Geovany Soto. That's not what they call the meat of the order. Further, more than half of the contact Cano makes turns out to be ground balls, which is just as it was last season. That's 1) a lot of ground balls, and 2) a lot of ground balls struck not too hard. It's not hard to see why hits would be harder to come by with that approach. That doesn't explain the loss of power, although every weak grounder Cano hits is another lost chance to drive the ball into the outfield. There is still a lot of mystery, here, and a lot of noise. There is also the cold fact that Cano's OPS—that's his on-base percentage plus his slugging percentage—is presently shy of teammate Nelson Cruz's slugging percentage-plus-nothing.

There is an appropriate level of concern though, as second baseman do age more quickly, likely due to the physical requirements of the position, namely throwing yourself on the ground repeatedly multiple times a game and occasionally getting run into at second base. This all can lead to premature career breakdown, a fact the Mariners chose to ignore or at least accept when inking a 30-year-old Cano to a ten-year deal. There are the various other caveats, but there is also this

So it makes the fact that things have not gone well for Cano this year concerning. There are likely many, many reasons that collectively answer the question 'why,' from batted-ball luck to better team defense to luck to aging to any number of other things— elephants, cheesecake, the relative size of q-tips these days, I don't know. Furthermore, players have down seasons all the time. Prince Fielder was execrable last season and is an MVP candidate in this one. It happens.

And this is happening, too. There is no reason, yet, to say Cano is finished and his contact is an albatross if this season ends badly. I wouldn't say that. But someone else will and, Prince Fielder Renaissance notwithstanding, they'd have a better shot than either Cano or the Mariners would like at being right. Baseball can be mean like that.