On June 16, Robinson Cano's season hit its lowest point. After going 0 for 4 in a loss to the Giants, Cano's OPS fell to .600, the second-lowest it has been since April, and by far the lowest it has ever been that late in the season.

Cano's plate discipline had fallen apart and, though he was still generating lots of hard contact, little was happening with it. He was hitting the ball hard, yes, but usually right into the ground, where Newton's Third Law took over and made all that velocity mean very little. Cano, once an annual 30-homer threat, was reduced to the world's most well-compensated slap hitter.  

Cano's turnaround began slowly, as he went 1 for 3 in the next game to get his OPS a few ticks above the .600 mark. Then he started to kick things into a higher gear, and all of a sudden, Cano is starting to look a lot like the guy we expected to see coming into the season.

Entering play Tuesday, Cano has played 27 games since June 16, exactly one-sixth of a full season. He his hit .299 with seven home runs over his last 114 plate appearances, and ranks fourth in Rotisserie scoring for Fantasy in that span. That isn't what you were expecting when you made Cano a potential first round pick in March, but at this point, any positive signs are cause for celebration. The question is, can Cano keep this up?

Before we get into some deeper analysis of Cano's bounceback, I want to acknowledge the inherent problem with the narrative crafted so far. It is entirely arbitrary. Looking back, we can pinpoint June 17 as the day Cano's season began to turn around, but it's not like there were promising signs pointing to it; Cano had a .512 OPS in his previous 27 games, and hadn't homered in 15 games as of June 16.

What changed on June 16? Cano admitted in early July he had been battling a stomach virus for more than a year, but there is no indication that he suddenly became healthy in mid-June. Maybe it represented the culmination of a long recovery process, but that kind of assumption is impossible to make. We can look at what has changed for Cano since June 17 (or June 23, or July 5), but the fact that we're dealing with arbitrary endpoints crafted to fit a narrative ex post facto means it might not have much predictive value. 

But, even if we can't exactly answer the "Why?" of Cano's turnaround, maybe we can at least get the "How?" 

The first thing to note about Cano's play since June 17 is, his plate discipline is still a mess. He has struck out in 18.4 percent of his plate appearances over the last 27 games, with just four walks to 21 strikeouts. For a player who had never struck out in more than 14.1 percent of his plate appearances before this season, that remains a huge red flag. However, where his elevated strikeout rate earlier in the season came with a bunch of singles and little else to show for it, Cano has been much better than that since.

Cano's nine home runs for the season put him roughly on pace to get to the 14 he hit a year ago, but he had just two on June 16. He has seven since, and is hitting .299/.333/.561 in that time, much closer to what we've come to expect from him. Of course, the issue for Cano was never whether he was hitting the ball hard enough to hit for power -- he just wasn't hitting it in the air much.

Cano's average batted ball came off his bat at 90.6 miles per hour through June 16 according to BaseballSavant.com, a very respectable mark that would put him in the top-50 for the season as a whole. Since June 17, however, he has been even better, raising his exit velocity to 92.5 miles per hour; that would rank 18th for the season, just behind Albert Pujols, another resurgent power threat.

Cano is hitting the ball harder during this hot stretch, then. That is a very good sign. Another good sign is how he has turned his batted-ball profile around. According to BaseballSavant.com's StatCast tracking data, Cano's groundball rate since June 17 is just 43.7 percent; it was 58.2 percent on June 16.

So, Cano is hitting the ball harder and he's hitting the ball in the air more often. If you want to hit home runs, those are two very good places to start, so Cano's power surge is backed up by a good process. Exactly why this change has happened is unanswerable, but I have one hypothesis; new hitting coach Edgar Martinez. 

Could a new hitting coach be helping Cano? (USATSI)
Could a new hitting coach be helping Cano? (USATSI)

The Mariners reassigned Howard Johnson on June 20, and you have to think Cano's sudden, seemingly inexplicable regression played a part in that decision. With that in mind, you also have to think Cano's swing would be one of the first thing Martinez focused on. There hasn't been much talk in the media on any potential concrete changes Cano has made as a result of Martinez's tutelage, but in lieu of better explanations, it is at least one possible thing we can grab on to as a solid sign of sustainable improvement moving forward. 

Whether Cano can keep this up moving forward is going to depend on whether there is something backing up his strong play. The Why? has to eventually have a concrete answer. However, if you've been waiting on Cano to turn things around, this last month is the most promising sign we've seen all season long. Even if it isn't peak Cano, it is good enough to start to justify his lofty place in the rankings.

And if we never get an answer for why Cano's fortunes changed so drastically, it's hard to imagine anyone will complain. As long as he keeps hitting.