Mike Fiers has allowed a major league-leading 16 home runs in just 36 innings of work. For comparison sake, he allowed 26 and 24 home runs in the past two seasons when he pitched at least 168.2 innings. That is simply not optimal for the Astros starting rotation. Or any rotation for that matter.
The home runs are also not the only issue for Fiers in 2017. If you choose to examine one of Fiers’ player pages on either Baseball Reference or Fangraphs, you would know exactly what I mean. For example on Fangraphs, Fiers has posted a 5.