Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out House Call: Why the World's Best Pitchers and Quarterbacks Seek This Man's Advice About this episode He got the Sandy Koufax seal of approval, then re-trained Nolan Ryan in his forties. He upgraded Drew Brees into one of the most accurate passers of all time, then went tête-à-tête with Tom Brady. He even tried turning Michael Jordan and Tim Tebow into baseball players. But for legendary pitching coach Dr. Tom House, the science of throwing is all in the mind, from performance anxiety to the human nerve bank. And now, at 77, he's looking into a future without Shohei Ohtani on the mound — and a 118-mile-an-hour fastball coming for your head.
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2:56 Pablo Torre? 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.
3:08 Speaker 02 We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour. I've done it a bunch of times with pitchers.
3:17 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:18 Speaker 03 You're listening to DraftKings Network.
3:36 Pablo Torre? 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.
3:49 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:50 Pablo Torre? And as a way of introducing you, I presume you have a general guess as to which day of your life I may be.
3:56 Speaker 02 It would probably be April 8th, 1974. I think it was about 8:06 PM.
4:03 Speaker 04 We'll see what Downing does. Al at the belt delivers, and he's low, ball one. And that just adds to the pressure. The crowd booing.
4:14 Speaker 02 A fastball from Al Downing to Henry Aaron.
4:17 Speaker 04 ...to the deep left center field. Futter goes back to the fine city car.
4:25 Speaker 02 Hit number 715. The only thing I can remember is thinking to myself, it's gonna, it's coming to me.
4:33 Speaker 04 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.
4:44 Speaker 02 And then I went blank.
4:47 Pablo Torre? The world is waiting for this, obviously.
4:49 Speaker 04 Back to the fan city.
4:51 Pablo Torre? And there you are.
4:53 Speaker 02 Right under the think of it as money sign.
4:55 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
4:57 Speaker 02 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's gonna go. If I would have stood still, it would have hit me right in the forehead. So it wasn't a great catch. I caught the ball. Bill Buckner said, how's he give it to me? Give it to me. And I said, no.
5:19 Pablo Torre? That's history.
5:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:20 Pablo Torre? That you're catching.
5:21 Speaker 04 A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south.
5:26 Speaker 02 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 gonna take the bullet. They had to peel her off of him.
5:52 Pablo Torre? Oh, wow.
5:52 Speaker 02 People don't realize that.
5:54 Pablo Torre? She's his bodyguard at that moment.
5:56 Speaker 02 Exactly. Exactly.
5:58 Pablo Torre? I didn't realize that. The guy there with the long hair and the big 70s goggles on.
6:05 Speaker 02 Shooter's glasses.
6:06 Pablo Torre? 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?
6:19 Speaker 02 No, I had no clue at all.
6:26 Pablo Torre? So I'm just gonna 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
7:07 Pablo Torre? 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.
7:36 Speaker 05 It'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... Close the left shoulder, open up the hip.
7:50 Pablo Torre? 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.
8:07 Speaker 02 If you didn't know who they were and you didn't know how they worked the game, you would pick Eli over Peyton every time.
8:15 Pablo Torre? 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.
8:41 Speaker 02 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.
8:53 Speaker 02 I'm sure you might recognize that name.
8:55 Pablo Torre? Familiar with the name.
8:56 Speaker 02 I brought it up the other day and the kids didn't even know who I was talking about.
8:58 Pablo Torre? Oh, man.
8:59 Speaker 02 He, when the Dodgers came out in 1962 or 63, they played in the Coliseum, but they did camps around the LA 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.
9:40 Pablo Torre? That's like having Michelangelo come by and say, "By the way, you're pretty good with this paintbrush."
9:44 Speaker 02 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.
9:51 Pablo Torre? What was the moment in your career when you began to think, "This isn't working out for me the way that I hoped it would"?
10:00 Speaker 02 As a player?
10:01 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
10:03 Speaker 02 It started in Boston. Don Zimmer brought me in a game to face a guy named Chris Shembless.
10:10 Pablo Torre? Yankee.
10:11 Speaker 02 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."
10:29 Speaker 02 And before Zim's family hit the bench, it was upper deck, game over.
10:33 Pablo Torre? Walk off.
10:34 Speaker 02 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.
10:54 Pablo Torre? There's a quote from Don Zimmer, manager of the Red Sox, your old boss. He said, quote, "I think a lot of his problems were mental. He wanted so much to do well for us. It seemed as though the harder he tried, the worse he got."
11:09 Speaker 02 He was exactly right. I thought too much and I cared too much. And that combination is a performance anxiety problem. So I became a defensive pitcher for about six, six months to a year after leaving Boston. And until I got involved with the research on performance anxieties, did I figure out a way that even a guy with my limited abilities could actually manufacture and do better with these particular protocols. And that became the beginning of my research into the PhD program.
11:47 Pablo Torre? So you get a PhD in sports psychology after you retire from baseball.
11:51 Speaker 02 Right.
11:51 Pablo Torre? Your career as a left-handed pitcher professionally is done. You go to grad school. And that part, you had what kind of reaction from your folks?
12:03 Speaker 02 Neither my mom or my dad could understand how anybody could make a living playing sports. And in fact, on her deathbed, my mom looked me in the face and she said, "Now, Thomas, when are you going to find a real job?" Seriously, they enjoyed coming to the games, but her number one priority for my brother and myself, no A, no play. If you want to play sports, you have to have straight As. And you can play sports as long as you go to school. That's why I went to school when I was 44.
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16:25 Pablo Torre? I want to speed run through a very long and colorful, and frankly, insane career. But you get to the Rangers, you get the position fundamentally of guy who's supposed to help these pitchers learn how to throw. And you do weird [BLEEP].
16:44 Speaker 02 Really weird. They were on a limited budget with a franchise that was barely hanging on.
16:52 Speaker 04 Defeat the Texas Rangers three to two on a little iffy play. Jammed him with a fastball.
16:59 Speaker 02 Tom Greve as the GM was one of those GMs that said, we know what doesn't work for us, let's try something new. So I mortgaged my house to get an aerial system and we brought it into Ranger Stadium and we captured data. Every hitter, every pitcher that went through there, we're talking about cube and high speed motion analysis. And we had two years of data. We've got measurements coming out of Yang Yang. What is it that we have? I said, you know, everybody's trying to film a million pitchers and see what they do. Let's narrow our sample down to 30 of the best.
17:44 Speaker 02 It's a stepwise regression analysis.
17:46 Pablo Torre? Mm-hmm.
17:47 Speaker 02 And we found nine variables, starting with balance and posture, that were dependent on anybody that wanted to throw strikes with health. And that was the year that we finished second.
17:59 Speaker 04 And that'll do it. Yankees in the ninth inning, no runs and two men left on base. And the final score, the Texas Rangers seven and the Yankees two.
18:10 Pablo Torre? The throwing the football thing. The idea that here were the Texas Rangers looking like morons, throwing a football on the field before games.
18:20 Speaker 02 Yep.
18:21 Pablo Torre? A key break with tradition was the use of footballs to improve baseball throwing skills. What flipped? When did that begin to get buy-in from both the team that you worked for and then broadly?
18:35 Speaker 02 When Nolan Ryan joined the Rangers and started throwing the football, at least they shut up publicly.
18:43 Pablo Torre? To look at Nolan Ryan's statistics on Baseball Reference now is to be reminded what the last five years of his career looked like. And it's to marvel at how the [bleep] he got better.
18:58 Speaker 02 I'll tell you how he did. He embraced the new information like it was manna from heaven.
19:05 Pablo Torre? I don't have Nolan Ryan as the guy being like, I would like the PhD nerd with the glasses to tell me how to do my job.
19:12 Speaker 02 And in fact, when he went into the Hall of Fame, he actually mentioned that, that Tom had all these weird ideas, but when I tried them, they worked.
19:23 Speaker 07 I was very fortunate to have a pitching coach by the name of Tom House. And Tom and I are of the same age, and Tom is a coach that's always on the cutting edge. And I really enjoyed our association together. And he would always come up with new training techniques. And because of our friendship and Tom pushing me, I think I got in the best shape of my life during the years that I was with the Rangers.
19:50 Speaker 02 And he literally said, I was a better pitcher from age 39 to 46 than I was any time during the previous 39 years.
20:02 Pablo Torre? So the guy who was at home playing with those glasses, wears these goggles in this role, but now you're Professor Gadget.
20:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:10 Pablo Torre? That's what they called you.
20:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:12 Pablo Torre? And so it's the biomechanical stuff, it's the footage you were collecting, the analysis you were doing, the regressions that you were running. This was the 80s and you were doing this.
20:24 Speaker 02 Think about a tobacco chewing coach from the 50s and 60s, listening to somebody like me talk about proprio neural facilitation. Can you see him? What's he talking about? It's a baseball, throw it. About drag crisis for movement on the ball, about spin.
20:46 Pablo Torre? Spin.
20:47 Speaker 02 About getting it closer, about effective velocity versus real velocity. And it was just, there was nothing wrong with it. It was just before its time.
20:56 Pablo Torre? I understand that if you're going to trace this, right, Nolan Ryan to Randy Johnson, and you go down the line, and you, your tentacles extend all throughout Major League Baseball, and I understand how that happened now. When does the football thing, at the highest level, become another part of your business?
21:14 Speaker 02 It began before Drew Brees, but it was rubber stamped by Drew Brees.
21:25 Speaker 02 Did he get in? Yes! Touchdown San Diego. I thought it was gonna be a mental emotional consult. And it started off that way. But as luck would have it, that was the season that he blew his shoulder out.
21:38 Speaker 04 I could see that big defensive lineman land on top of him, drove his arm over his head. And then I saw Drew walking off the field with his arm locked like this and couldn't bring it down. And I said, oh my goodness, he's dislocated his shoulder out the bottom.
21:55 Speaker 02 He and I spent the summer post-surgery in an aerobics room at the Pacific Athletic Club, just figuring out ways to make our arms work without lifting weights or throwing anything. So that became the body work that put his shoulder back to function, to where he could throw the football. And then the rest is history from there.
22:22 Speaker 02 Great, wide open. Wide open!
22:26 Speaker 02 And Smith, what a way to do it!
22:32 Speaker 02 Most accurate passer in the history of the game. All right, so the word kinda gets out and people start tapping on the door. Alex Smith was one of them.
22:43 Pablo Torre? Yeah, my guy.
22:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, another testimonial to curiosity and someone trying to make... So even though it was weird, they were coming by to see what was going on. And then the quarterback that picked up for Tom Brady, here it is on...
22:58 Pablo Torre? Castle.
22:58 Speaker 02 Matt Castle, was a baseball pitcher at USC. And he said, "Hey, Tom, is it okay if I bring Tom Brady by?"
23:08 Speaker 02 I said, "He wants to come by?" And I said, "Sure." So Tom showed up, and it happened to be a day when I had 10-year-olds. I think I had a javelin thrower and a golfer besides a couple quarterbacks and a pitcher.
23:22 Pablo Torre? I just like the idea of just like it's you and a bunch of people throwing some stuff.
23:26 Speaker 02 Exactly. And I can remember Tom looking and going, "I'm not sure." And as it turned out, we hooked him just because of that. The stuff that he was doing that was new made him feel stuff in his delivery. And one thing that people don't realize about Tom Brady, he is demanding. When you're a coach working with him, every throw is under the microscope. What'd you see? I felt this, what should I have felt?
23:57 Pablo Torre? So you're being tested.
23:59 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. And then if he didn't think I was paying attention, he'd screw something up.
24:02 Pablo Torre? Wait, just to explain this, though. So Tom Brady would tank a throw to test you, whether you're paying attention?
24:10 Speaker 02 Yes. And what he didn't realize is that I knew that he knew. The thing that was hardest for him to understand was his front side had just say closed till the last possible second. He was taught, like all quarterbacks in his generation, to pull that front side through to get more on the ball. And it's just the opposite. If you've got a vector going this way, you can't put force on it that way or as much spin. Drew was extremely accurate with a base that was too broad. He could not throw long effectively. Tom Brady, on the other hand, could throw in the next week, but he had a base that was too narrow. So we spent a good part of the first three years
24:54 Speaker 02 we worked together narrowing Drew Brees's stance and spreading Tom Brady out and firming Tom Brady's front side up. They both took volumes of notes. I think Tom told me he had 17 spiral notebooks. Drew had 12 or 13. And both of them, they shared in common film study. They would look at film and look at film and look at film and look at film to where they had already played the upcoming game in their head before the game even started. And that's an anxiety reducer and a stress reducer.
25:35 Pablo Torre? What's the biggest difference between a baseball player and a football player? When it came to how you learned about their wiring and their methods?
25:45 Speaker 02 To be honest, quarterbacks are the easiest athlete to work with. They're used to huge amounts of data to be processed quickly and turned into action. Pitchers, on the other hand, don't have a time clock. Well, they do now. But pitchers are a tough sell.
26:03 Pablo Torre? Right.
26:03 Speaker 02 Because they don't have to be on the spot. They're expected to figure out how at their pace and...
26:12 Pablo Torre? Someone's not trying to actively murder them at the moment.
26:14 Speaker 02 Exactly. Even though the fear of... A football player's fear of getting hit by a baseball is way greater than a pitcher's fear of getting hit by a linebacker. Weird, huh?
26:26 Pablo Torre? Is that right?
26:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. They're afraid of the baseball. Even though Brady could have been a big league catcher, Drew could have been a big league shortstop. Guaranteed, take it to the bank.
26:36 Pablo Torre? Why are they afraid of the baseball?
26:38 Speaker 02 I don't know. Because it hurts?
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30:12 Pablo Torre? I want to get to the larger trend that we're seeing in baseball, which is velocity. The average major league fastball is 93.7 miles an hour now. I mean, I'm old enough now, Tom, to regard that as nuts.
30:27 Speaker 02 It's crazy.
30:28 Pablo Torre? 94 is the resting, that's mediocrity.
30:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you're in 93, 94, you're lucky to be in the first three rounds of a draft.
30:38 Pablo Torre? Did you ever think that we'd get to a place where, I'm looking at the statistics here, that five pitchers last season would average 100 miles an hour?
30:48 Speaker 02 Not to tip my own cap, but we were the original research on velocity. With a two-pound, one-pound, 6'5", 4" and 2-ounce ball, we both threw and held on to. We stole that from tennis. Tennis players never have bad shoulders on the backside because they hang on to the racket. We took that to the training. You're only as strong as your weakest link. As soon as their weak links started getting matched up with their strong links, velocities went off the chart.
31:24 Speaker 03 A 104 from Aroldis Chapman. Strike three call, 105 on the interedge. Swing and a miss, strike three. It was 105.5 miles an hour.
31:40 Speaker 02 Most of the training we do for arm speed now is not done for strength. It's done for the nervous system to understand it can make itself go faster. And you know what the term myelinization means?
31:52 Pablo Torre? What does it mean?
31:53 Speaker 02 You have this bank of nerves that where you're going to perform something a certain way, and when you're doing it over and over, your brain's not stupid. It's not going to waste time going to 80% of the stuff that doesn't contribute. It's going to go to the things that myelinate 100 mile an hour fastball. So these kids are reaching a point now where their arms, their central nervous system, and their ambient nervous system has been trained that 100 miles is possible.
32:24 Pablo Torre? So myelination, I am now realizing, when you say myelination, it is not referring to mile as in mile per hour. It is M Y E L I N A T I O N.
32:35 Speaker 02 Exactly.
32:36 Pablo Torre? The process of forming a protective insulating layer called myelin around nerve fibers in the central and peripheral nervous systems, obviously.
32:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, and when you wrap that, it's a fatty tissue substance. When you wrap it with myelin, then when it gets to the nervous system that's time to throw, that nervous system can go faster than if you'd spread it out over six or seven different spaces.
33:02 Pablo Torre? Is velocity at this point, now that it is achievable in ways and to a frequency, that is kind of mind blowing? Does it feel like it's overrated?
33:15 Speaker 02 You still have to pitch. And let me throw something at you, you can laugh at over the next few years. We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour. I've done it a bunch of times with pitchers. Can they do it for a game, a season, an inning, whatever? Haven't figured out how yet.
33:34 Pablo Torre? The ceiling, though, is 118.
33:36 Speaker 02 Maybe not an everyday pitcher, but it's possible. I mean, everything I'm looking at, research wise, says it's possible. The mechanics of Randy Johnson, the 105 guy from Cuba.
33:52 Pablo Torre? Aroldis Chapman?
33:53 Speaker 02 Aroldis Chapman. And we looked at all those hard throwers. And if you mixed and matched all of them, then you'd have the guy that's throwing 118 today. But steroids, everybody beats up.
34:08 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
34:08 Speaker 02 And right for so, because it was illegal. Don't necessarily mean you can be skilled.
34:14 Pablo Torre? Did you ever do steroids, Tom?
34:15 Speaker 02 I did. Not because I was a genius or whatever. I wanted to find out if what they said was true. And I threw 84 miles an hour when I weighed 170 pounds. I threw 84 miles an hour when I weighed 210 pounds. So steroids didn't do anything for me except blow my knees out.
34:36 Pablo Torre? You're a bad pitch man for steroids.
34:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, the thing that amazes me is a hitter should not be able to catch up with 105 miles.
34:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I was gonna say, let's turn the camera around the other way now. You're at the plate.
34:50 Speaker 02 This, okay, if you add together the time it takes the best hitter in the game to swing at a pitch, he should not be able to hit 105 miles an hour. The time zone had up, but they do. It's this ambient nervous system where the decision to swing doesn't go to the brain. It goes to one of the meridians in your shoulder, your elbow. It's like when you touch a hot stove, your finger comes off before you know it's hot.
35:18 Pablo Torre? Right.
35:19 Speaker 02 That's what's happening with hitters.
35:20 Pablo Torre? You're moving faster than your brain can actually articulate the thought.
35:23 Speaker 02 Exactly. And I swear to God, I don't, when people say that hitting is the single hardest thing to do in sport.
35:30 Pablo Torre? Yes.
35:31 Speaker 02 Times 10. That hitter pitcher relationship, that dance is gonna be, that's what makes baseball, to me, as interesting as any sport that's out there.
35:41 Pablo Torre? Just fact checking Greg Maddux, for instance.
35:43 Speaker 02 Right.
35:44 Pablo Torre? A guy you worked with, who is famed as the craftiest.
35:48 Speaker 02 He is the Drew Brees of pitchers.
35:51 Pablo Torre? Average velocity, right? Low 90s?
35:54 Speaker 02 If that.
36:08 Speaker 02 But the genius of Greg Maddux, he threw the velocity where he had the most movement. He could still, even in his later years, he could have thrown 95, 96, but it flattened out. So there's three ways to get a hitter out. You get him out with speed, change of speed, and movement.
36:28 Speaker 02 And he was a genius at all those. And a fastball in at 90 is faster than a fastball away at 90. Per se velocity. One foot a distance, three miles an hour.
36:41 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
36:43 Speaker 02 So what he was, was a guy that had a release point closer to home plate than any other six foot pitcher. Could make the ball move and he could change speeds.
36:52 Pablo Torre? Right. So the Randy Johnson thing, just as a matter of comparison, right? His whole architectural advantage is that he could release the ball because of his height and his wingspan closer to home.
37:02 Speaker 02 Exactly. He released the baseball 48 feet, six inches from home plate. That's the cut of the grass in front of the mound. And he was effectively wild.
37:12 Speaker 03 Now, this ball, obviously, just getting away from him, but watch the reaction of John Cruck. Would you say his heart is palpitating a bit?
37:22 Speaker 02 And Randy, doesn't mind me saying this, they knew every pitch that Randy was throwing in his big league career.
37:28 Pablo Torre? They knew what was coming.
37:29 Speaker 02 They knew what was coming. But you couldn't dig in on him because he would do two sliders on the half shell and throw one behind your head without even trying. So he was what we call effectively wild. The fear factor hitting off of Randy was, I'm just going to take my chances. I don't want to know what's coming.
37:47 Pablo Torre? Yeah, various pitchers, as well as birds, learned that.
37:50 Speaker 02 Exactly.
37:51 Pablo Torre? So when it comes to the competitive advantage that arises, or diminishes, when everybody's throwing faster and faster, and Greg Maddux, for all of his craft, is glacial in comparison. What does this say about the future of the soft tosser? You coached Jamie Moyer.
38:11 Speaker 02 What goes around comes around. Right now, every staff in the big leagues is looking for a pitcher like Jamie Moyer.
38:19 Speaker 03 Towards shortstop, easy hop for Valdez. He's got it across the diamond.
38:26 Speaker 02 Jamie Moyer at the age of 47 has thrown a two-hit shutout. Jamie Moyer was me only really good at being me. Where he just run him out there and it may be ugly one game, but at the end of the year, he's gonna give you innings, he's gonna hold games close, and he can be productive. You can count on him, he's never gonna be on the DL. What's the biggest problem right now with baseball? Half the pitching staff.
38:51 Pablo Torre? Injuries.
38:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's no durability. So, right now, in the spring training conversations that I have, everybody's looking for a durable right-hander or left-hander that they can literally abuse without hurting his arm. And that's gonna be someone that doesn't throw overly hard or overly soft, but knows how to pitch and can give it to you anytime he wants to look at it.
39:15 Pablo Torre? So, the innings eater.
39:16 Speaker 02 The innings eater.
39:17 Pablo Torre? Is suddenly even more valuable now.
39:19 Speaker 02 You gotta save your studs, and you can't have 12 studs on a staff. You gotta have someone that can eat it so that the stud can perform.
39:28 Pablo Torre? Right.
39:29 Speaker 02 That's where it's going.
39:30 Pablo Torre? Right.
39:31 Speaker 02 And that's how guys like me will get back into the big leagues.
39:34 Pablo Torre? You turned Tim Tebow into a baseball player.
39:36 Speaker 05 You wouldn't normally have this many fans, or this many reporters, or a news helicopter show up to cover what amounts to minor league study hall. But they were all there Monday to see Tim Tebow make his official debut as a minor league baseball player.
39:52 Pablo Torre? Regrets, reflections?
39:54 Speaker 02 He was 10,000 reps behind as a quarterback and the same amount as a hitter. If he could've done one or the other with enough mileage, he could've played both. He could've been a solid backup, but his entourage didn't merit, even though it was a good entourage, being a backup quarterback and having that many things in the clubhouse. Everything you see about Tim is true, but again, he was short on reps as a quarterback throwing and short on reps as a hitter, hitting.
40:29 Pablo Torre? What did you learn working with him about what it means to do your job?
40:33 Speaker 02 What it means is when you're behind the eight ball at the elite level, it's the same thing that happened to Michael Jordan.
40:52 Speaker 07 Michael Jordan is getting by on sheer athletic ability and hard work. Just an average minor league baseball player when he was the best basketball player ever.
41:05 Speaker 02 All right, Michael Jordan was probably the best athlete on the planet. But when I threw batting practice to him, I looked him right in the face and I said, "As long as your [bleep] is pointing down, you're not going to hit the ball in off the plate." Long arm man in can't hit. If he would have played baseball from the start, he probably could have been a really good big leaguer.
41:28 Pablo Torre? Could you turn someone like Lamar Jackson into a pitcher?
41:32 Speaker 02 Tell you what, he's a pretty good athlete.
41:44 Speaker 02 But again, being on a mound where the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth is different than being behind center with 20 seconds going in the last quarter. You're out there on an island by yourself and I don't know if he has that makeup. If you're a pitcher and you can't make a pitch in that situation, it's toast.
42:09 Pablo Torre? So the similar question, right, of could you turn Paul Skeens into a quarterback?
42:14 Speaker 07 He's made it six in a row to start the day, Paul Skeens.
42:19 Speaker 02 No, he couldn't. He's too wired to pitch a baseball. Now, he throws a football, I don't know if you're aware.
42:25 Pablo Torre? No.
42:25 Speaker 02 But he throws a football.
42:26 Pablo Torre? Of course he does.
42:27 Speaker 02 As part of his training program.
42:30 Pablo Torre? This is just speed round now. Do you think Shohei Ohtani should keep pitching?
42:32 Speaker 02 No.
42:33 Pablo Torre? No?
42:34 Speaker 02 I think he's a hitter. He's proved all he needs to throw, all he needs to do as a pitcher.
42:49 Speaker 02 I think his value to the ball club is on the field every day. And I'm going to say this with, I hope I'm wrong. I don't think his shoulders can handle it.
43:01 Pablo Torre? Hmm. What are you seeing there?
43:05 Speaker 02 It's a combination of a bunch of stuff. Primarily, the thresholds with heavyweight training are really good for hitting, but not good for pitching. And the everyday stresses of throwing down the hill. When you generate energy on flat ground, the most you can get out of flat ground is about four times body weight in foot pounds of energy. When you're going down the mound, you get about six times body weight. I don't think his shoulders can handle that, the deceleration. I haven't ever worked with him. I'm only looking from afar. I'm looking at his mechanics are very good. His makeup is outstanding. He's a dude, but I don't think his body can do both.
43:45 Pablo Torre? Hmm. But the pleasure, did you watch him and
43:49 Speaker 02 With awe.
43:49 Pablo Torre? Self-evidently, unprecedented.
43:52 Speaker 02 Right.
43:53 Pablo Torre? But you're saying for his own long-term
43:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:57 Pablo Torre? Interest.
43:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:58 Pablo Torre? Just kidding.
43:59 Speaker 02 I think his Hall of Fame life is going to be from an everyday player.
44:23 Pablo Torre? So by this point, I think it's clear that I could talk to Dr. Tom House and mine his brain for takes on the future of sports for an extraordinarily long time. Tom, the more I think about it, was a pioneer. He was using science and regressions and video analysis to evolve the art of throwing, melding it truly with rigorous psychological study, turning it all into a science. And all this was decades before the value of that scientific analysis became self-evident and omnipresent in some form all across sports. But the skill Tom has that is even more rare, the skill that so many data nerds still can't
45:05 Pablo Torre? hack their way around, is the thing that I consider his real gift. The gift of communication. It's his ability to articulate what is in his head to others, to really connect with the people who are searching for his wisdom, me included. And Tom's future in that regard is something that I wanted to find out about too.
45:30 Pablo Torre? How did you discover that you had Parkinson's?
45:33 Speaker 02 I love to throw. And I was, if not, I was one of the best BP pitchers in the history of baseball. And I noticed when I was throwing BP, the ball would get away from me. I'd throw a ball that would hit someone in the foot. And I also noticed when I was walking that I was shuffling and leaning forward. And I thought, okay, something's wrong. Went and got tested, thought I had a brain tumor or something. Couldn't find anything there. And then one of my best friends, we were walking toward a practice range. He said, Tom, I think you have Parkinson's. I said, all right, what, how do I find out? He said, call this guy. So I got tested and I did.
46:19 Speaker 02 They figured I'd been misdiagnosed for about three years. So I've had it for about 18 years.
46:25 Pablo Torre? Wow.
46:25 Speaker 02 And then when I figured out the prognosis, I said, this doesn't look too good for me. And I said, okay, let's figure out what we can do. So I took everything that I've been doing with elite sports and started throwing at Parkinson's people. And we're not curing it, but we're slowing it down.
46:43 Pablo Torre? I like the idea of your brain being trained on that problem.
46:47 Speaker 02 Well, if it can be figured out, I'll stumble into it. And the doctor that I was working with at the time said, you know, you have to, it doesn't kill you, but you don't die from it, you die with it. But your quality of life is, it's going to be harder on you than you think. Then I found out that dopamine is the reason we have Parkinson's. If your brain stops producing dopamine, then all the symptoms like I'm showing right now, where I start to quiver and my voice goes away, that's my price to pay. But if you can keep your dopamine up and add in something else, they can give you synthetic dopamine,
47:30 Speaker 02 but you keep having to take more and more and more just to hold your own. So I made up my mind. N-caffeines and endorphins are basically brothers and sisters of dopamine. It's an en, it's an upper, it's a feel-good thing. And they've taken my skin cells. My skin cells are becoming...
47:50 Speaker 02 The stem cells that they can inject at the base of my brain to make sure that dopamine production starts again. I'm involved with that research for the last 12 years. Most important thing is not to be a burden for my wife. And the second most important thing, I've gotta get what's in my head out to you kids before I punch my ticket.
48:11 Pablo Torre? You're 77 now?
48:13 Speaker 02 I'll be 78 April 29.
48:15 Pablo Torre? Okay. Happy early birthday.
48:17 Speaker 02 Thank you.
48:19 Pablo Torre? I, I believe that if you have just listened to this interview, you would not have necessarily known that you've been handling Parkinson's for 18 years.
48:30 Speaker 02 So you don't notice my voice?
48:32 Pablo Torre? When you mention it, sure.
48:35 Speaker 02 It's the good Lord paying me back for all the bullshit I did way back when.
48:40 Pablo Torre? But I read at one point, it was an interview you gave in August 2021, that you were preparing to go on vacation for the first time in your life.
48:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. I've been on a vacation my whole life, being able to play. I've never worked a day in my life. I'm playing every day. And the, the joy of going to the field and working with a 12-year-old or coming hanging out with you still keeps me going. And I'll be on, driving home tonight, my, my adrenaline will carry me. Cause I had a really good time doing this.
49:10 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
49:10 Speaker 02 And you've brought memories back that haven't come to the surface for a long time. So thank you for that.
49:16 Pablo Torre? No, Tom, the ability that you have to explain complicated things, recall ancient things, and then look into the future.
49:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:29 Pablo Torre? Is a rare thing.
49:30 Speaker 02 And I think the future is really good. And I, you, you know, you love baseball, so do I. It's just, it's just now figuring out what it needs to do. Baseball's gonna get better and it's trying to change. The greatest right we have in this world is to change. What's the hardest thing for us to do? Change.
49:50 Pablo Torre? So at the end of every episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, a show about finding stuff out, Tom House, what did you find out today?
49:58 Speaker 02 I find out that there's not enough of you out there. That there's, everybody's looking for the immediate laugh, buzz, whatever. There's stuff that's way deeper, that does really influence kids. Everybody thinks that if you talk about being autonomy, that you can be, not everybody can be autonomy, but you can be the best you that you can be. And that's what we lack in this country. Everybody's about outcome, they're not about process. And that is killing us.
50:30 Pablo Torre? Dr. Tom House, you know how to coach someone up.
50:35 Pablo Torre? Even podcasters.
50:36 Speaker 02 Thank you. So let's not, let's try to do this again. Find a topic that nobody else would touch.
50:41 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
50:42 Speaker 02 And we'll do it again.
50:43 Pablo Torre? You're, you're our guy now.
50:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I'll, I'll tell the truth. What are they gonna do? What are they gonna do to me? That's the attitude you have to have.
50:51 Pablo Torre? What a goddamn delight.
51:02 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
51:08 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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