What's up with Randy Johnson?

For a pitcher that won the Cy Young four years straight, 1999-2002, and then after an injury-abbreviated season, came back to almost the same peerless level (171 adjusted ERA) in 2003, his Yankee career is getting less memorable all the time.

Last year he did go 17-8 with 3.79 ERA but that was the highest he had recorded in a full season in 15 years. Even though it was 17 points better than the park-adjusted league average (his worst adjusted ERA in 14 seasons). This season, his ERA is almost double what it was before he came to the Yankees (5.13). He's had two starts in ? in which he has failed to get out of the fourth inning and has not finished the seventh since beating the O's 7-1 with eight innings on April 23.

And if that weren't bad enough, his strikeout have been plummeting. After recording at least ten strikeouts per nine innings in every full season from 1991 to 2004(with a high of 13.41 in 2001), he fell to 8.42 Ks per nine innings last year, which should have been a large red flag going into this season. His current rate (6.15) would be the lowest of his 19-year career by a full strikeout per nine innings.

All of this made me wonder if his rapid (apparent) decline had anything to do with his almost freakish height. Maybe by looking at comparable players throughout baseball history, we could have predicted that Johnson was a candidate for career deterioration. But there are only a handful of players that are comparable in stature to the 6'10" Sr. Unit. Then again, maybe a pitcher who was 6'5" in the Twenties would stand out as much.

So what I did was I adjusted the height of all pitchers throughout baseball history based on the average height. I based it on the player's height adjusted for the average height in the year in which he debuted. Those at least one standard deviation above the average height will be the comparable pitchers to Johnson. They are the "Tall" group (type of 1). The ones at least one standard deviation less than average are the "Short" group (type 3). The rest are just "Average" (i.e., type 2, except ones with no reported height, which are type 0).

Given all that, here are the twenty tallest pitchers in baseball history based on adjusted height:

See, the aptly named Johnny Gee comes out ahead of Johnson even though he is an inch shorter because he played almost seventy years ago when players were, on average, about an inch and one half shorter than today.

Now here are the shortest, headed by another aptly named player:

Next, I ran the total numbers by height class by age ranges. Below are the results. Note how the "Tall" players take longer to develop, have a shorter by better peak (especially in strikeouts) and then rapidly decline (even in strikeouts). Remind you of anyone?