The regression over two years for Yennier Cano has been steep, from an All-Star campaign to one that leaves questions about his future in the Orioles bullpen. The answer is hard to pinpoint, and some of it may simply fall on the fact that Cano is a known commodity now.

When the right-handed reliever burst onto the scene with a 2.11 ERA in 2023, he took the league by surprise with an unhittable sinker, slider and changeup combination. Two years later, Cano is hittable. He entered Tuesday with a 5.18 ERA. And while his sinker and slider still boast positive underlying metrics, the largest regression comes from his changeup.

That pitch was dominant two years ago. Since then, it has been figured out by batters, who entered Tuesday hitting .375 when making contact against the pitch.

A few weeks ago, pitching coach Drew French sat down with Cano to discuss a way forward. What they settled on was a new grip for Cano’s changeup.

Cano went from a circle changeup-esque grip, with his middle finger placed between the seams over the center of the ball, to a split-finger approach, meaning his index and middle fingers stretch to either side of the seams. With it, they hope, lies the answer to get Cano back on track.

“We haven’t seen it enough to know if it will [work], but down the stretch here, we want to give it its due to find out what it’s going to be going into ’26,” French said.

The early returns are promising, creating a depth-oriented offering that has a different movement profile from the sinker. When studying Cano’s movement profiles, he was mostly east-west oriented — a slider and cutter showing glove-side break; a changeup and sinker displaying arm-side run.

His four-seam fastball can work at the top of the zone. But he lacked a pitch that moved sharply down, or on a north-south trajectory, and the new split-grip changeup now covers that.

“This year, for whatever reason, the changeup is floating a little bit more, and I think we’re trying to find ways to make positive change on it,” Cano said through team interpreter Brandon Quinones.

What he means by that is the changeup occupied a similar part of the zone as his sinker, and while it ran arm-side with slower velocity than his sinker, left-handed hitters in particular could focus on the low-and-outside part of the zone for two pitches. That simplified the at-bat for a lefty, and it reflected in their results. Entering Tuesday, left-handed hitters held a .981 on-base-plus-slugging percentage against Cano.

So Baltimore changed the grip, and with it, they hope Cano can return to his groundball-inducing ways.

“He loves his changeup, and he really, really wants this pitch to be a performer for him,” French said. “The next best thing was to see if we can change the profile of it a little bit and see if we can find something you’re confident in using more in the strike zone, using more at the bottom.”

In one month, Cano added three inches of drop to his changeup.

“Mirroring his sinker would be fine, but to make hitters respect a different dimension was kind of the intent behind it,” French said of the grip change. With his changeup dropping more than it used to — and more than any pitch in his east-west arsenal currently does — the results have improved.

In July, Cano threw only nine changeups. Batters still hit .500 against the ones with which they made contact. In August, Cano elevated his changeup usage to practice the new grip, and opponents batted .143 against it. Batters also whiffed 30.8% of the time against the split-change version of the pitch compared to a whiff rate that reached a low of 13.6% in May.

It remains to be seen if that improvement lasts throughout the final month of the season. Cano hasn’t thrown it enough yet for the new grip to be considered an unequivocal success, and batters will begin to adjust to the altered movement.

But as the Orioles think of what 2026 will look like, a return to form for Cano would be a boost for a bullpen that is without many of their key contributors of the past. Félix Bautista’s shoulder surgery will force him to miss most, if not all, of next season. The Orioles traded away four relievers ahead of the deadline. The relief corps will look different, but Cano’s improvement would solve at least one of the many holes in that unit.

“It’s been a difficult year,” Cano said. “I think sometimes you can have a bad outing or get some bad results and that can mess up your year, basically. I think there’s been some of that. But because I know that my pitches are still pretty effective and they are moving a lot, I have a lot of confidence to get back to where I was.”