One projection thinks Cano will do about as well as last year. Another sees harder times coming.
For two magical months early in the 2023 season, Yennier Cano could not be touched. His ERA began with a 0. He barely walked anybody. Cano rode these and other superlatives into being an All-Star that season, along with his closer teammate Félix Bautista. It was a formidable back end of the bullpen. Now two years later, what can we expect to see as the “real” Cano coming up in this season?
This is an important question for the 2025 Orioles. They need Cano to be something like a rock near the back end of the bullpen. That’s especially going to be true early in the season, when manager Brandon Hyde has already said he’ll be trying to avoid using Bautista heavily. That means no multi-inning chances for the Mountain and no pitching on back-to-back days.
The only external move that the Orioles made to fortify the bullpen this offseason was the signing of Andrew Kittredge. With Kittredge getting increasingly gloomy injury updates, that only adds to the importance of the carryover guys from the 2024 bullpen, including Cano, being able to step into the gap.
Now that we’ve seen him pitch a second season, there’s a pretty decent idea of what the real Cano maybe looks like. Check out these two batting lines of hitters against him over the last couple of years:
- 2023 (July 1-end of season, 39 games): .250/.294/.414
- 2024 (full season, 70 games): .242/.317/.372
In 2024, he walked batters a bit more often but made up for this by giving up less power than he did in the second half of 2023. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the second half ERA from 2023 is close to the same as the full season number from 2024: 3.24 to 3.15. That’s a season and a half of reasonable consistency. It’s only disappointing compared to the first couple of months introduction we got to him in 2023. It might also be disappointing if Cano is increasingly plugged into the ninth inning.
Can we expect more of the same from Cano this season? Here’s what two of the big projection systems are seeing for him in 2025:
- ZiPS: 63.1 IP, 3.27 ERA
- PECOTA: 57 IP, 3.96 ERA
These are two different ERA pictures. The ZiPS number is continuing more of the same from the past season and a half for Cano. PECOTA’s near-4 ERA is not the ERA of someone who belongs in the late-inning mix of a team that’s contending. (Let’s not look too hard at Seranthony Domínguez finishing with a 3.97 ERA with the Orioles a year ago and them bringing him back.) If Bautista is regularly resting and the signing of Kittredge amounts to nothing, a 4+ ERA from Cano would be a big problem.
For the over/under discussion below, I’ll be using the ZiPS ERA number. I like to use ZiPS because it is freely available to the public, and also because its creator and maintainer, Dan Szymborski, grew up in Maryland and has good opinions about pit beef sandwiches.
The case for the over
Any reliever’s performance could take a swan dive into oblivion at any time, for no concrete reason that any fan could predict. Orioles relievers are not immune from experiencing this phenomenon just because they seem like nice guys and we have fun memories of them contributing to good Orioles teams.
Or there could be concrete reasons that someone could predict too. Cano had a couple of Statcast trends working against him last year that probably blew his ERA up into the 3s when it could have been lower. One is that he was walking too many dudes – very close to one batter in ten walked for the season. It’s a bad percentage. The other is that batters who made contact hit the ball hard, often. Cano was just 13th percentile in preventing hard-hit balls.
Maybe it’s small sample size and maybe it’s not, but here’s another possible problem if Cano is going to bear more of the ninth inning workload if Bautista is resting. Career ERAs by inning:
- 7th: 2.59
- 8th: 2.35
- 9th: 4.95
That plus Cano pitching in the ninth more could be a recipe for the over.
The case for the under
Cano has some Statcast stuff going in his favor too. He was in the 99th percentile for ground ball rate, with 63.5% of balls in play going on the ground. That’s not quite Zack Britton at his peak level, but it’s really good. The danger of a hard-hit ball on the ground is much less than a hard-hit ball in the air. Despite the high walk rate, he’s also proven adept at getting batters to swing at pitches outside of the strike zone, where they will typically be able to do less damage if they make contact.
There may also have been a bit of a bad luck element for Cano in 2024, with a BABIP of .314. That’s an elevated number. It could have been bad pitching rather than bad luck, but if you’re inclined to believe that, you’re not looking for the case for the under, are you? We know Cano can do better than a 3.24 ERA because he’s done it twice, even last year when he was “disappointing” relative to what he’d done the year before.
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The All-Star of 2023 won’t be coming back. That’s okay. The Orioles don’t need Cano to do that. They just need him to do at least as well as he did last year. That doesn’t feel like it should be too much to ask, but you never really know. Where do you think he will end up?