As I sat in my seat in Section 432A tonight watching Robinson Cano foul off pitches, all I could think was “please don’t be having one of those stupid at bats where you should have walked three pitches ago”.
You see, on the surface from your seat where you have no real sense of the strike zone you think “Wow! He’s really battling here! Something good is going to happen!” And then you realize that it is Robinson Cano and there is a good chance he should already be on base.
Wow, look at all those not strikes! Even accounting for the quirkiness of Pitch F/X, that is ridiculous.
I do, at times, really love Robinson Cano. He has immense talent both offensively and defensively. But there are times when watching him bat is as irritating as watching AJ Burnett pitch. And tonight was one of those times. But at least I only had a slight sense of this until I got home.
Yes, I realize he is never going to just sit back and take a new approach and walk a lot but he could at least not ground into a double play to end the game like that on such a bad pitch. Low and outside/borderline pitches are his bane and every time he makes an out on one I get angry.
Once he has two strikes, he had no choice but to be defensive. Being patient at the plate is something you grow up doing. The old saying about Dominican players is “You don’t walk off the island”.
Well, he was 0-2 from fouling off the first two pitches as well. The first one probably would have been a called strike, the second one probably not. But that’s Robinson Cano in a nutshell: throw him outside off the plate and he’ll go for it because he can make contact. Of course, the reason he can make contact because he’s that much of a natural hitting talent.
He’s never going to change but that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating as all fuck to watch him dribble out off that stuff.