Tom House
speaker
105 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tom House’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour. I've done it a bunch of times with pictures.
It would probably be April 8th, 1974. I think it was about 8.06 p.m.
A fastball from Al Downing to Henry Aaron. He hit number 715. The only thing I can remember is thinking to myself, it's coming to me. What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.
And there you are. Right under the think of it as money sign. Yeah. So when we drew straws as the bullpen guys on where we wanted to be, it was basically analytics before our time. It came exactly where if Downing made a mistake, that was where it was gonna go. If I would've stood still, it would've hit me right in the forehead. So it wasn't a great catch. I caught the ball, Bill Buckner,
I said, how does he give it to me, give it to me? I said, no. That's history that you're catching.
A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south.
Then running into home plate, I got there, kind of dove through the pile, and I put the ball up in front of his face. His mom and he were hugging, and he took the ball, said, thanks, kid, and I got pushed out of the equation. But people don't realize he was getting death threats and his mom was hugging him because she was going to take the bullet. They had to peel her off of him.
People don't realize that.
Exactly.
No, I had no clue at all.
If you didn't know who they were and you didn't know how they worked a game, you would pick Eli over Peyton every time.
I think in today's game, I wouldn't have been able to even go to junior college because I didn't throw hard. But because of this guy, Sandy Koufax, I'm sure you might recognize that name. Familiar with the name. I brought it up the other day, and the kids didn't even know who I was talking about.
He, when the Dodgers came out in 1962 or 63, they played in the Coliseum, but they did camps around the L.A. area, close to where I grew up. And I was at the clinic, and as the day was winding down, Sandy Koufax walked by me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, what's your name, son? I said, Tommy House. He said, Tommy House, you have a big league curveball. Let me tell you about curveballs.
There are good curveball hitters, but nobody hits a good curveball. You keep throwing that pitch, I'll see you in the big leagues in four years. He was right.
And you know what that did for me? I put up numbers well enough to be able to hang out with a big league pension.
As a player?
It started in Boston. Don Zimmer brought me in a game to face a guy named Chris Chambliss.
Yankee, who I had gotten out 35 out of 40 times. And Zim gave me the ball in a tight game and said, I don't give a darn what you do. Don't let him take you deep.
And before Zim's family hit the bench, it was upper deck, game over.
Walk off. And that was the beginning. I didn't pitch for 42 days after that. The joy of going to the ballpark every day kind of got diminished a little bit when I knew I was in the doghouse and was probably never going to get a chance to work out of it.
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