High above the baseball field at USC a pitching Buddha sits in an
office surrounded by his computers and printouts, on the search always for a new
wrinkle, a different way. Baseball fears
Tom House’s influence. Golf loves his theories. Football is intrigued by his
methods. And two of the star quarterbacks in this weekend’s NFL title games
swear by him.
Tom Brady and Carson Palmer are among the many passers who walk
up the drive named for Mark McGwire, climb the stairs and step into the small
office House shares with his handful of associates. They listen as he explained
how he spliced their throwing motions into hundredths of seconds and identified
flaws invisible to the human eye, which can only see 32 frames a second. Then
they let him fix their multi-million dollar throwing motions.
And undoubtedly they chuckle as he says: “Those fucking things don’t lie.” This
is because you’re going to learn a lot of truths when you can watch life happen
at 800 frames a second. At that speed, even Tom Brady is going to have plenty of
imperfection.
“We’re pretty good. Like, real good” House says, slumping on a couch in the
office, adjusting the glasses that along with the brown moustache make him seem
younger than his 68 years. “Our if-thens … we can actually tell you point in
time exit velocity capacity, and predict what it will be if you do this and
this. In other words, we can tell you what you are today and tell you that if
you do this with your legs, this with your torso, this with your arms as far as
conditioning is concerned and do the same with the vectors of your body, then in
six-to-12 weeks you will be throwing this hard.”
He pauses.
“That’s why we keep having people show up,” he says.
Down below, in the third-base bullpen, an eclectic group of athletes gathers in
a winter morning chill. A rising pitching prospect from the Minnesota Twins
stretches near a Yankees farmhand. A pitcher washed out of baseball is wondering
what it will take to get one last shot. A quarterback fresh out of SMU and
wearing white ping-pong balls strapped to his body is throwing a football in a
batting cage before an eight-camera armada. A small-college pitcher sits with
his mother while a young Ivy League quarterback eyes this gathering with a look
that seems to say: Brady comes here?
But it all works, House says, because the principles are the same. The lessons
taught to a high school freshman pitcher are the same for NFL quarterbacks.
What the kid sitting with his mother will take from today is remarkably similar
to what Brady and Palmer and Drew Brees and Alex Smith hear whenever they sit in
this bullpen.
He knows why they are here, why Cardinals star Jaime Garcia is on his way from
the airport on this morning, why Brady and Palmer and Brees return, why Tim
Tebow called him years ago and asked for help in getting back to the NFL. He has
science; the other pitching instructors and quarterback gurus do not. This is
the difference, his calling card. His resume says he has a doctorate in
psychology. He says the study of mechanics that he does in the office above the
baseball field at USC is certified by an institutional review board at USC.
This, he insists, is what makes him different.
He does not refer to what he does here as coaching. Instead, he says he
conducts: “human trials.”
What other quarterback gurus are doing that?
“Tom says when you pass a certain age you really got to learn to re-learn,”
human trial patient Tom Brady told
the Los Angeles Times’ Sam Farmer in 2012.. “A lot of it’s re-learning
different things that maybe you’ve done, or have become habits that you’ve done
thousands and thousands of times, (and) that you really need to train yourself a
different way to improve certain aspects of your mechanics.”
On an April night in 1974, House stood in the Atlanta Braves’ bullpen and
watched the ball Hank Aaron hit to break Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record
fall toward him. He leaped, stuck up his glove, and felt the ball smack against
his hand. There’s a picture of him shaking Aaron’s hand in the mayhem after his
blast. For years, this is how America knew Tom House. He was the guy who caught
Hank Aaron’s home run.
He was hardly a memorable pitcher. In eight years, with three teams, he won 29
games, had a 3.79 ERA and walked nearly as many as he struck out. His lone
redeeming skill was being left-handed. Had he been right-handed he never would
have pulled on a big-league uniform, let alone be standing in the Braves bullpen
on that night 42 years ago.
It was almost as if that baseball was meant for him, as if it had chosen the
iconoclast in the Braves bullpen to thrust his name before the world. His
pitching wouldn’t take him far, but someday a curious mind would put him
together with the biggest names in football.
“I had no friggin’ clue what I was doing,” he says with a laugh. “I’m
consciously confident, maybe. I’m Forrest Gump, if I had to give a description
of myself. I hope I don’t get in trouble for using his name, but it’s kind of
stumbling into things without having any clue why.”
A few years before he retired he sought out Gideon Ariel – a sort of sports
iconoclast in his own right. Ariel had developed a way to film what House calls
“rotational athletes” – anyone who uses their arm in an overhand motion.
Together they taped everything from tennis players to baseball pitchers to
fly-fisherman. As the data piled up they tried to assess it. What could they
learn?
Slowly, things began to make sense. If a baseball pitcher kept missing his
intended location low, it was because he was moving his torso the wrong way.
They realized that pitchers who had one kind of length to their stride when they
delivered pitches had fewer injuries than those who didn’t. Eventually they had
developed a model that focused on quantifying the movement in each athlete’s
motion, and finding the ideal timing to maximize velocity and accuracy and
minimize the strain put on a player’s arm.
“He wanted to be scientific instead of guessing,” Ariel says.
The two stopped working together years ago, and rarely speak. But Ariel wasn’t
surprised to hear House had become the trusted adviser of football’s most
glamorous quarterback.
“I’m sure he’s doing very well,” Ariel says. “He’s using the right system.
Coaches can’t quantify (a quarterback’s) motions. They don’t have the tools.”
For a time, House was a big-league pitching coach. His biggest fame in this
capacity came with the Texas Rangers in the 1980s, working for Bobby Valentine,
then in his first managerial job. House brought his theories to the Rangers with
varying success. He gained notoriety for making his pitchers throw footballs in
the outfield before games, something he admits now was more of an experiment
than something with tangible purpose.
The Rangers never had outstanding pitching staffs in those days, though that
might have been a condition of playing in a hot climate in a park favorable to
hitters. Craig R Wright, a pioneer in baseball’s statistical-analysis movement,
worked with the Rangers at the time, and eventually wrote a book with House. He
does not remember his co-author as a great pitching coach.
House focused too much on the development of a pitcher rather than thinking what
that pitcher could do for the team right then, Wright says. He was too
interested in the quality of a pitcher’s pitch than its effectiveness. There was
often a difference between the two. Wright always thought House would make a
better roving minor-league pitching instructor – someone who could drop into
some small city ballpark, adjust a prospect’s flaws, then move on.
But Wright also remembers great successes. House, he says, turned Charlie Hough,
a mediocre knuckleball pitcher into a durable, effective starting pitcher, and
he helped Nolan Ryan control his blistering fastball. Ryan, of course, was
probably destined to be in the Hall of Fame when he got to the Rangers in 1989
at the age of 42. But Ryan always had trouble throwing strikes consistently. It
was House, Wright says, who solidified Ryan’s mechanics and helped his first
three years in Texas become some of the most efficient of his career.
“Whenever I see a guy who had his fastball jumping all around, that usually is
related to the inconsistency of his (front foot) landing spot,” Wright says. “I
find that happens about 90% of the time. I learned that from Ton.”
Up in his office at USC, House sighs. Baseball is strange about him. The big
league teams tend to hold him at a distance. Instead of having credibility in
baseball front offices because of his career as a player and pitching coach, the
opposite is true.
“Baseball is very reluctant to accept anything new from the field, let’s put it
that way,” he says. “A lot of stuff (like statistical analysis) trickles down
from the front office but not from the field. I will have to admit there could
probably have been a better person than me delivering science to baseball.”
Like who? He is asked.
“If Sandy Koufax would have been delivering it, it would have been
instantaneous, but when you’re a marginal part-time reliever, you know? It
doesn’t mean much.”
He chuckles.
“Surprisingly, those guys don’t need to have science,” he says.
Football, however, listens. While baseball executives would rather not hear from
him, several NFL coaches have sought his advice. The NFL, he thinks, is more
open-minded; its coaches are seeking new ways to win a tiny handful of games. If
an old relief pitcher with a table filled with computers can find magic in a
quarterback’s arm, plenty of NFL coaches are willing to see what he has to say.
House is secretive about his clients. He only talks about specific quarterbacks
and their workouts if they clear the interview. Likewise, he reveals little
about his work with NFL teams except to say that he works with three head
coaches. And of those three, the only name he will reveal is that of new 49ers
coach Chip Kelly.
“I don’t think he’d mind me bringing his name up,” House says. “Chip Kelly has
no problem sitting myself and [House’s assistant Adam Dedeaux] down with his
whole coaching staff and talking through it. I’m talking conditioning coach,
nutrition coach, line coach, whatever. He’s an avid learner. He’s always
looking.”
It must strike him as funny to be a sage for some of the world’s best
quarterbacks, but he shrugs when asked about them. He says he has “the
Rolls-Royce sample,” meaning the best of the best. Players like Brady, Palmer
and Brees listen. They absorb. They understand things faster than the baseball
players. It’s been his experience that baseball players don’t come to him unless
they are failing. Only then are they willing to have him film their motion and
seek the in hundredths of seconds. The NFL quarterbacks come because they want
to be even better than they are.
“The quarterbacks who come to us are pretty sharp,” he says. “They learn
quickly. They are kinesthetically blessed.”
He stands up to leave. The group of pitchers and quarterbacks in the bullpen are
waiting for him to give a lecture on nutrition. Then they will head into the sun
and throw – the pitchers with baseballs, the quarterbacks with footballs. And to
anyone who steps into the baseball stadium at USC at this moment would be
perplexed by the little white baseballs and huge brown footballs whizzing
through the air on a baseball diamond.
And it’s a long way from the night Hank Aaron’s home run landed into a future
pitching Buddha’s glove.