Where will former Vanderbilt baseball ace Kumar Rocker be selected in the 2022 MLB Draft?

The 2021 MLB Draft was supposed to be a formality for former Vanderbilt baseball ace Kumar Rocker. Instead, after being drafted 10th overall by the New York Mets, Rocker failed a physical and was not offered a contract, left with no recourse other than to re-enter the draft this year.

Rocker pitched for the Tri-City ValleyCats, an independent team in New York, to showcase for scouts this summer. He showed he is healthy, although ESPN reported that he'd had a shoulder scope in the fall.

Now, his draft stock is uncertain. On most draft boards, Rocker ranks somewhere among the back half of the first round — MLB Pipeline has him No. 38, Prospects Live No. 21, Baseball America No. 20 and ESPN No. 54 — but with a wider range of possible outcomes than most draft prospects. One thing helping Rocker is that most of the other top college pitchers in the draft also have injury concerns in a year especially light on college pitching.

"It wouldn't shock me if somebody had given him pretty close to what he was expecting to get last year ($6 million)," said Geoff Pontes, an MLB Draft and prospects writer for Baseball America. "I mean, maybe it's a million dollars or something like that less, but I think there's a ceiling there where somebody could just buy in and fall in love. ... He's probably the one with the most pedigree."

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Successful showcase

Rocker made five starts for the ValleyCats, totaling 20 innings. He had a 1.35 ERA with 32 strikeouts and four walks. While the competition level in independent ball is variable, many of the hitters he was facing were former minor leaguers in their late 20s.

Less important than the actual results, though, is that Rocker showed the same stuff as when he was at his best with the Commodores.

Pontes, who saw Rocker's first start, said his fastball was in the high-90s, touching 99 mph. He also showed two breaking balls, including his signature slider, and a changeup. Later in the 2021 season, Rocker had been utilizing a different arm slot, more over the top, but Pontes said what he saw from Rocker was more like the slot he had used earlier in his career.

Pontes and ESPN MLB Draft expert Kiley McDaniel agree that the stuff Rocker showed was similar to when he was at his best with Vanderbilt. During the 2021 season, his velocity fluctuated, but that did not happen with the ValleyCats, albeit in a limited sample.

Injury concerns?

If this had to happen to Rocker, McDaniel and Pontes agreed that this year was the best possible time, with so many of the other potential first-round pitchers also coming with injury concerns. Tennessee right-hander Blade Tidwell also missed time with shoulder soreness.

But any kind of shoulder issue, even a supposed minor one, is far more cause for concern than Tommy John surgery or another elbow issue.

"I can't think of a guy that's had shoulder surgery, and like it has never come back up again, he just comes back and it's perfectly fine," McDaniel said. "... Everything I'm hearing from everyone who knows even better than I do and my own experience is, you have to look at him differently, and I don't know how much, but I think you basically have to have a rank a little bit lower than he was last year. And that's sort of open to interpretation; every team is going to be a slightly different answer to that question."

The track record for players in similar situations  isn't great, but the sample size is very small. McDaniel said the most similar case he could remember was Barret Loux, drafted sixth overall out of Texas A&M in 2010. Loux failed a physical due to a torn labrum in his shoulder as well as elbow ligament damage, then was declared a free agent after not being offered a contract. MLB changed its rules shortly afterward to prevent players like Rocker from becoming free agents if they declined a pre-draft MRI. Loux made it to Triple-A, but struggled to stay healthy and never made the majors.

"The total number of examples that are similar is like a single digit number; there's still not that many," McDaniel said.

Where he'll go

Many industry experts still believe Rocker will likely go in the first round, as there are no other college pitchers available who can match his track record. However, McDaniel said one of the biggest results of the shoulder injury was that those in the industry now believe he is more likely to wind up a reliever, which hurts his stock as durability was one of his hallmarks at Vanderbilt. If the team that drafts him puts him in the bullpen, however, he could make the majors quickly.

Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on Twitter @aria_gerson.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Kumar Rocker: Where MLB mock drafts 2022 have Vanderbilt pitcher