House Call: Why the World's Best Pitchers and Quarterbacks Seek This Man's Advice
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Who is Dr. Tom House and why is he important?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours.
And today we're going to find out what this sound is.
We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour. I've done it a bunch of times with pictures.
Right after this ad.
You're listening to DraftKings Network.
The superlative, Tom. The superlative that you deserve is the foremost expert on throwing in the world. I do, though, before we get to throwing, want to start with a time you caught something. Okay. And as a way of introducing you, I presume you have a general guess as to which day of your life.
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 then I went blank. The world is waiting for this, obviously.
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.
She's his bodyguard at that moment.
Exactly.
Exactly. I didn't realize that. The guy there with the long hair and the big 70s goggles on. Shooter's glasses. Shooter's glasses. Did that guy have a sense that he would become the greatest authority, the greatest, most respected thinker and coach on the subject of throwing things in the history of sports?
No, I had no clue at all.
So I'm just going to assume that you have no clue who the man I'm talking to is. But what I need you to understand is that to be a quarterback or a pitcher at the highest possible level is all about precision physics under public pressure, which is, in other words, a marriage between mechanics and mind. And so when the best throwers in the world need help with that marriage, what they do is make a house call. Because Dr. Tom House is the only psychologist who is also a major leaguer and also the author of 22 books. A man whose clientele spans both football and baseball, from Tom Brady to Greg Maddux to Drew Brees to Nolan Ryan to Andrew Luck to Randy Johnson to Tim Tebow and on and on and on and on. And typically, Tom House is a background character in the lives of these very famous people, not unlike that video of Hank Aaron that we showed you.
For instance, you may have missed Tom House being name-checked by Eli Manning when Eli went viral for imitating the hip thrust routine of Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott on ESPN. That's the Tom House stuff. Here, I'll show you, Peyton. It's about creating torque, right? It's about creating, you close the left hip, open up that right hip, close the left shoulder, open up the hip. When I touched base with Tom recently while I was out in LA, what I found out immediately was that Dr. Tom House is in a different mood these days. At age 77, he is finally ready to fire off some takes.
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.
And so what I wanted to do today was climb into Tom House's brain. I wanted to find out why all of these elite athletes, including the kids, continue to trust this weird PhD who likes teaching his pitchers to throw footballs, for instance, and whose own fastball, if it can even be called that, could not crack 85 miles an hour at Tom's peak.
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