During last night’s Phillies-Diamondbacks game in Arizona, starter Adam Eaton was mediocre, allowing six runs in four innings of work. Despite the poor performance, his night essentially hinged on one at-bat, and unfortunately for Eaton, it didn’t work out in his favor. What, exactly, did Adam Eaton do that was so noteworthy?
With the bases loaded and one out, Eaton could see light at the end of the tunnel when Randy Johnson stepped to the plate. Augie Ojeda had just flied out to shallow center field and couldn’t get the runner on third home, and with the pitcher up, Eaton had a great chance of getting out of the inning without surrendering the Phillies’ slim 2-1 lead. Instead, Eaton walked the 6’10” pitcher on four pitches.
To put that in perspective, only one player in Major League history is taller: the Washington’s Jon Rauch. Two others are equally as tall as Johnson: San Diego’s Chris Young and the Mets’ Eric Hillman, whose brief Major League career started in 1992 and ended in 1994.
Randy Johnson’s strike zone is freakin’ huge, but exactly how huge is it? We know home plate is 17 inches wide, but according to John Walsh’s excellent data-driven article on the strike zone:
It appears from this
data that the umpires' strike zone is about two inches too wide on each side
[for right-handed hitters], compared to the rulebook strike zone.
So, generally speaking, Johnson’s strike zone is about 21 inches wide. To find how tall his strike zone is, we could find out the space between the letters on his jersey and his knees, but since I don’t have the privilege of being in his presence with measuring tape, I’ll cite Walsh’s article again. He has a table labeled “Actual vs. Rulebook Strike Zone Dimensions (inches).” For right-handed batters (RHB), we see that the upper limit of the strike zone is about 42.7 inches, and the lower limit is 21.6 inches. Subtract the latter from the former and we have a strike zone that is 21.1 inches tall – essentially as tall as it is wide; nearly a true square. However, since that data is taking the average of a lot of data for left-handed batters, 21.1 inches is not representative of Johnson’s height.
According to this chart on Baseball Almanac, the average player is about 6 feet even. Johnson is 6’11” so a rough estimate would put Johnson’s height as adding about 4 inches to the vertical strike zone.
Subtract the upper limit (42.7 inches) from the lower limit (21.6 inches) and we get 21.1 inches. Add our rough estimate of The Big Unit’s extra 4 inches to it for 25.1 inches. If we multiply that by the width of the strike zone, 21 inches, we get 527 square inches – the area of Johnson’s strike zone. How did Adam Eaton miss? According to MLB Gameday, Eaton was only close with one pitch:
That’s just incredible. And to add insult to injury, after Johnson walked and Chris Young drove in a run on a ground-out to shortstop Eric Bruntlett, Stephen Drew hit a three-run home run. If Eaton gets the easiest out in the line-up, either the game is tied or the D-Backs take a slight 3-2 lead, presumably.
Just for fun, I looked through The Big Unit’s play index and found that of his 15 career walks, four have been on four pitches:
July 16, 2002 @ Giants: Top of the fourth inning, one out. Walked by Russ Ortiz; Dellucci to 3B; Moeller to 2B.
July 20, 2004 vs Giants: Bottom of the fifth inning, two outs. Walked by Jerome Williams.
August 20, 2004 vs Reds: Bottom of the third inning, no outs. Walked by Luke Hudson.
May 6, 2008 vs Phillies: Bottom of the fourth inning, one out. Walked by Adam Eaton; Upton Scores; Reynolds to 3B; Montero to 2B
Of the three other pitchers 6’10” or taller, Chris Young is the only one to have also been walked on four straight pitches: August 15, 2007 by Colorado’s Ubaldo Jimenez.
Overall, there's not much you can actually learn from this (besides that I have too much free time), but it was just one of those amazing feats where a pitcher is so inept at hitting the strike zone that he walks a 6'11" hitter on four pitches.