Has Cano’s plate discipline taken a step back?

It’s not often that you can look at a player hitting .310/.322/.621 (.403 wOBA) and feel like his performance has stepped back from last year. Maybe it’s just me and/or maybe Robinson Cano has spoiled us all, but there’s one part of the second baseman’s game that has taken a nose dive during the first 14 games of the season: his plate discipline. At least superficially anyway; Cano has drawn just one walk this season and his 3.14 pitches per plate appearance ranks 197th out of 200 qualified big leaguers. The only three below him are noted hackers Orlando Cabrera (3.10), Miguel Tejada (2.97), and Vlad Guerrero (2.97).

Cano set career highs in walks (57), unintentional walks (43), walk rate (8.2%), and unintentional walk rate (6.2%) last season, but he did so while swinging at 36.5% of the pitches he saw outside of the strike zone. That was also a career high, and ranked 184th out of the 205 players with 400 or more plate appearances. So given Robinson’s utter lack of walks this year, you’d think that he’s swinging at even more pitches out of the zone, right? Wrong.

The table above is taken right from Cano’s player page on FanGraphs, and you can click for a larger (and easier to read) view. Cano is actually swinging at fewer pitches outside of the strike zone this year, albeit but a very small amount, but the real change comes on pitches in the zone. He’s hacking at four out of every five pitches over the plate, and making contact at his usual (and absurdly high) rate. This suggests that he simply isn’t getting into many deep counts, and the data backs it up.

Baseball-Reference shows that Cano has not worked a single 3-0 count this season, not once in his 59 plate appearances. Furthermore, he’s only been in two 3-1 counts and two full counts. Two (each)! That’s four three-ball counts all year, or 6.8% of his plate appearances. Last season Robinson worked a three-ball count 113 times (that’s removing the 14 intentional walks), or in 16.6% of his 682 plate appearances. In 2005 and 2006, his first two years as a big leaguer, it was 9.2%. It hasn’t dipped below 11.8% since, so clearly this is completely out of the norm for Cano.

So you know what that tells me? That this utter lack of working the count is just an unsustainably bad pace for Robinson. It’s more of a small sample size issue than a definitive regression in his plate discipline. I haven’t seen anything in his at-bats to suggest otherwise, he’s still very productive and hasn’t turned into an easy out. Cano has established himself as a .320 BABIP guy over the last few seasons, so he’s got a tiny little bit of a rebound coming there (he’s at .304 at the moment) plus what should be a huge correction in his walk rate. A .322 OBP is not good by any stretch of the imagination, at least not for a middle-of-the-order guy, but Cano is underperforming his career norms and looks poised to bounce back into the .350+ OBP range once we get a little deeper into the season.