This is gonna be the last time I bring this up, I promise. I made a post containing this concern on Kluber in the mock draft thread (the actual post goes into more detail, but this was the gist of it).
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimHalpert
His velocity is dropping, people are hitting the ball harder, and they're hitting it in the air harder.
Is he going to have an ERA of 8 and be run out of the league? Of course not. But you're spending a 2nd or 3rd round pick on a guy that has a lot of warning signs for not returning that type of value.
So far this year his velocity is now at 90.5 according to fangraphs compared to 92.1 last year. His FB% is 42.9% compared to 36.3% last year. Hard hit % is 50% compared to 27.6% last year.
The HR/9 is at 2.45.
Meanwhile, his K rate and BB rate are relatively in line with normal. 8.84 compared to 9.5 and 2.95 to 2.39 respectively.
It's a small sample size yes, but the hypothesis was that a trend in velocity was proving to be problematic for his gb% and hard hit% which combined with a slight dip in k% due to it was potentially problematic for someone being drafted in round 2/early 3. And so far his velocity is down, his gb% is down, and his hard hit % is up resulting in a fip of 5.50.
I don't expect the HR rate to be that high of course and the hard hit % will drop some too. Again, I don't expect him to be this bad. But if you can get value equal to where you drafted him still by someone I think you should do it.
Again, I promise this will be the last I bring it up. Definitely don't want to be the one that's always harping on the same thing. I just get a ton of help from this thread and when I think I have something I want to help out too.