A Conversation With Tom House, the “Father of Modern Pitching Mechanics”
Tom House doesn’t need an introduction within baseball circles, and that’s especially true when it comes to pitching. His credentials are impeccable. A big-league reliever throughout the 1970s, the now-73-year-old went on to have an extensive coaching career, not only in MLB, but also in NPB and at the amateur level. A co-founder of the National Pitching Association, and the author of several books, House has been referred to as “the father of modern pitching mechanics.”
House addressed a variety of pitching topics — and shared a handful of interesting anecdotes — earlier this week.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with pitch counts. Atlanta manager Brian Snitker said during an NLCS media session that he was “blown away” to learn that Max Fried had never thrown more than 109 pitches in a game, adding that a career-high should be closer to 140. He also suggested that once Fried got into his rhythm he might have been able to throw 200 pitches. What are your thoughts on that?
Tom House: “From research, there are three things that keep a pitcher’s arm healthy: workloads, number of pitches, [and] his functional strength and mechanical efficiency. The research goes all the way back to Paul Richards, who was the general manager of the Orioles. Richards was the first guy, when he had ‘the baby birds,’ the four 20-game winners. He intuited that 100 pitches was about when most pitchers start getting into muscle failure — this assuming they have pretty solid mechanics and some functional strength. The 100-pitch idea grew from there, and has kind of become the standard.
“What it boils down to is, if you can pitch… I’m going to give you a resource. If you go to ASMI.org and look for age-specific pitch totals, Glenn Fleisig and a bunch of us did the research. I know for a fact that Nolan Ryan had a 260-pitch outing one time, and came back four days later and threw a two-hitter. He was with the Angels, and I think threw 14 or 15 innings. But with pitch totals, a blanket 100-pitch per game is kind of the standard right now. Everybody works forward and backwards from there.
“Greg Maddux would be a perfect example of someone that had a whole bunch of complete games and never really got into muscle failure. He also averaged just 11.2 pitches per inning. The pitch totals that are out there right now… when they’re not quite sure about mechanics, and they’re not quite sure about functional strength, pitch totals is something that the analytics people can hang their hat on. But Snitker was probably right. When you’re throwing like the kid did, 140 pitches would be a walk in the park. That said, not everybody understands mechanics and functional strength, and that’s why the pitch-total limits are what they are.”
Laurila: Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal must have thrown over 200 pitches in their legendary [16-inning] matchup in the early 1960s.
House: “Yes, they both threw a couple of hundred pitches. I think the final score was 1-0.“
Laurila: And Spahn was over 40 years old at the time…
House: “Remember, the thing that puts the stress on the arm is when mechanics, or strength, aren’t there. If they have not taken care of… a little sidebar: You prepare, you compete, you recover, and you repeat. What happens in today’s game is that a lot of these kids don’t recover properly, so they’re in a deficit when they go back out there to pitch. And the deficits compound. That’s when they end up blowing out an elbow or a shoulder.”
Laurila: How does a pitcher go about recovering properly?
House: “Well, I can give you a couple of things from the research we’ve done. On the major league level, a starting pitcher that can recover in 48 hours has a two-game swing on his [won-lost] record over a pitcher that takes three days to recover. So most of the new research in today’s baseball world is about recovery. That’s why I think that baseball has probably made more gains in the last three to five years than any time in the history of the game. That’s with bio-mechanical analytics, with functional strength, with pitch-total management, and with nutrition and blood chemistry for recovery.”
Laurila: Is recovery largely about the removal of inflammation?
House: “Inflammation is a combination of… there’s a lactic acid buildup. There is the stress involved in accelerating and decelerating the arm. If the mechanics are inefficient, it usually ends up being a problem on the front side of the shoulder, or the inside of the elbow. If it’s a functional strength issue, it’s the backside of the shoulder and the backside of the elbow.
“With the conditioning coaches and the trainers in the sport right now, we’re much more aware of how to manage the recovery. Where they’re stiff and sore, they can address a hotspot. The quality of information to go with the analytics of the game is so much more intelligent and efficient than when I played.”
Laurila: Given all the progress made in that area, can recovery time be shortened to where it would be possible to go back to four-man rotations? That’s something Trevor Bauer has expressed an interest in.
House: “Well, Trevor Bauer is one of those outliers whose arm has never bothered him. I don’t think we’re ever going to see that 250-275 inning guy again. I think the game we’re watching right now… I talked about this five, six years ago, when I saw the trend toward starting pitchers throwing fewer and fewer innings.
“A little quick story: When Nolan Ryan came to the Rangers, the first game where he had trouble, Bobby Valentine sent me out to find out how he was doing. I got to the mound and said, ‘Nolan, how you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m doing terrible, but it’s way better than what you’ve got going in that bullpen, so get the hell off my mound.’ I went back to Bobby and said, ‘OK, we’re going to have trouble getting him out of there.’
“Bobby went to take him out of the game a couple of innings later. When Bobby said, ‘That’ll be it, Tex,’ Nolan said, ‘No it won’t. One of us is leaving the mound and it’s not going to be me.’ In Nolan’s generation, if they didn’t get seven-plus innings, they felt like they were failing. But those days are done. I don’t think that stud No. 1, or stud No. 2, who signs a huge contract and is expected to throw 250 innings a year is going to be around. I think the game is going to go to 10 to 12 pitchers, no more than two times through the lineup, three days a week.”
Laurila: That said, is it actually necessary? Are pitchers are not capable of pitching more innings, and staying healthy while doing so?
House: “They are, but I don’t think anybody is willing. It’s a crapshoot to find that guy, and then if you develop him, you have to pay him. It’s the economics, the risk reward of trying to develop that stud pitcher, versus not necessarily having to pay 200 million for a seven year deal. It’s economically more sound. I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t see it. I think what’s going on right now — what we’re watching in the World Series, and what we saw in the playoffs — is exactly where it’s going to go.”
Laurila: In 1968, Mickey Lolich won Game 7 of the World Series on two days rest.
House: “Randy Johnson, the year Arizona won the World Series. He came in and relieved after starting the night before. But that’s when the season is basically over, and it’s all hands on deck. Madison Bumgarner is another example. The pitch totals were off the charts, but those guys are stud athletes. They’re superstars. Even in a deficit, they can get you through a game or two in a short series called the World Series. It’s not something you’d ask a pitcher to do in August.”
Laurila: Was Mike Marshall a unicorn?
House: “Mike Marshall and Trevor Bauer are cut from the same cloth. What Mike did with the Dodgers in 1974 [106 appearances and 208 innings]… I’d get to the ballpark early and he’d be in the outfield, throwing a shot put around. I think he also threw batting practice once or twice a week that year. That’s something Trevor Bauer could probably do, but you’re right, guys like that are unicorns, or at least outliers. They don’t happen very often.”
Laurila: Several years ago I interviewed a pitcher named Josh Outman, whose father had developed a bio-mechanically-structured delivery. Outman used it growing up, but not in pro ball as it was seen as being too ‘different.’
House: “I don’t remember hearing that. I’d have to see the analytics on the bio-mechanical efficiency. That’s one thing I know we’ve done well with. I’ve probably got 900-plus major league pitchers in our computer, with 3D motion analysis, so I have a model that I’m pretty confident with. If you follow our timing, sequencing, and recommended variables — and you train accordingly — we’re pretty predictive on not hurting an arm.
“I know that a lot of stuff that Trevor Bauer does is similar to what we do, but he also does some things that work for him that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to a lot of the people that I work with.”
Laurila: For years it was said that Chris Sale’s elbow would eventually blow out.
House: “We have his delivery — we have him in the computer — and he was very Randy Johnson-like. What I think happened to him was, number one, pitch totals. Number two was his functional strength. His mechanics were actually OK, it was his functional strength and the pitch totals that got him.”
Laurila: You’ve mentioned functional strength a couple of times. What exactly is that?
House: “You can only accelerate what you can decelerate, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So for these pitchers, hitters, golfers, quarterbacks — any rotational athlete — if the decelerators, the brakes, can handle the accelerators — the things that speed the arms and the legs up — then you’ve got functional strength.
“Basically, if you’re a front side guy, a weight room guy where you only work on your pecs, your biceps, and your quads, then you’re not going to be able to throw any harder than your lats, supraspinatus, and all the muscles on the backside of your arm, can slow down. If you haven’t built them up, and you try to throw harder than they can slow down, that’s when you have a blowout.
“It’s the mound that’s the issue. Basically, we’re designed to throw rocks at rabbits, to eat them. That happens on flat ground. Our research shows — this is EMG [electromyography] testing — that the energy you create when you step and throw is about four times body weight. When you get a mound, it’s six times body weight. So the only unnatural thing with an overhand throw is the mound; that’s the only unnatural thing about pitching. Going down the hill helps your acceleration, but it’s really hard on your deceleration. You have to train yourself to handle the mound, because we’re genetically predisposed to throw on flat ground.”
Laurila: You’re often referred to as the father of modern pitching mechanics. How did that come about?
House: “I think I was the first field coach to take advantage of three dimensional motion capture with the cameras and the light sensitive dots, and actually quantify movement — science-based and measurable — and come up with a mechanical model of how biomechanics and the laws of physics apply to the human body. The old school coaches and pitchers probably knew what to do, but they didn’t know why. 3D motion analysis at 1,000 frames a second allows us to actually measure, where the human eye can only see 40 frames per second.”
Laurila: You’re currently working with a new product called Mustard.
House: “You gave me the perfect segue to that. What we did with Mustard is that we took all the data capture, all the analytics, all the research that we’d captured from motion analysis, from functional strength evaluation — all that stuff — and we put it on a cell phone. With this, a mom or a dad of a 12-year-old can film their young athlete, male or female, throwing in the back yard, and we can give the same exact efficacy of evaluation that our elite athletes get.
“Mustard basically becomes a handheld mentoring device that will allow… right now, 80% of young athletes quit playing before the age of 14. Our goal is to help the moms and dads have the same information and instruction that our elite athletes get, right there at their house or on their Little League field. With that, kids will be able to play sports a little bit longer. If we get them to play through high school, then we’ve got both a healthier athlete and a longtime fan. In my opinion, sports are one of the few things left that actually teaches a youngster how to deal with what’s going on with artificial intelligence in our crazy world today.”
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
I made a donation to Fangraphs last week, and I think this interview alone was worth the cost.
Great article. Gives some hope for pitcher health in the future if recovery and functional strength can be ubderstood.
Link to an article that shows Josh Outman’s unorthodox original mechanics:
https://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/09/former-cy-young-winner-says-he-can-help-pitchers-throw-115-mph
That was a really great interview.
Snitker has managed the Braves every year Fried has been on the team. He’s “blown away” to learn of the career high of a mere 109 pitches. Can’t but wonder what It is he is paying attention to all those hours in the dugout.
How does my pitcher look? How are the pitcher’s mechanics? How is his velocity? Is he taking more time between pitches? Is he showing other signs of fatigue? Is this the third time through the order? Does he still have a platoon advantage against any of these batters? Is he still able to get guys out?
Who is coming up in the opposing lineup? Whom can we have warming up in the bullpen? Who’s rested that we want to bring in if there’s trouble?
There are a ton of things a major league manager should be paying attention to in the dugout, and the career high pitch counts of their starting pitchers isn’t even close to being on that list.
Fantastic interview. Laurila’s articles is by far some of the best content. He gets so much info from players and people within the sport.
What a fascinating discussion, but sadly, not very satisfying. It is disappointing to see that he does not see the starting pitcher returning to a position of importance that was the standard for most of the history of baseball. The stories of the legendary pitchers throwing great games on 2 days rest, Burdette in 57, Koufax in 65 and Lolich in 68 are what we remember, not some game where the winning team used 7 pitchers in every game. I didn’t like to read his reasons for the diminution of importance of the traditional ace. The fact that teams are afraid to find out if they have truly great pitchers, like Gibson, Seaver, Spahn, Marichal, and on and on, is very discouraging. For this reason alone, Trevor Bauer has become a player that I admire tremendously. HE WANTS TO BE GREAT but the Ivy League bean counters won’t let him! If Chris Sale broke down because of pitch counts why didn’t all the great pitchers I previously mentioned, along with Ryan, Reynolds, Lemon, Wynn, Feller and another hundred, not break down when their pitch counts were far greater than anything Sale ever threw? I found the use of Paul Richards as an example to be dubious. He last managed the Orioles in 1961, well before the four pitchers each won 20 games, 1971, and those pitchers, Palmer , Cuellar and Dobson all threw over 280 innings and 18-21 complete games, while McNally threw 224. Some 100 pitch limitation? Mr. House does agree with me that he doesn’t like the direction that starting pitching is taking and it is taking away a part of what made baseball the game it was.
The answer to this involves one thing that House didn’t talk about but is a factor in injuries in all modern sports:
As we get better at training athletes, we can improve muscular development, mechanical efficiency for the creation and distribution of force and stress, etc. Modern pitchers throw harder, more consistently, than older pitchers did – just in the era where we have pitch data, average velocities are up several MPH, and those start less than 20 years ago. Guys are throwing harder than they did historically, because of these better training methods, nutrition, and everything else that goes into better muscle development.
The issue that House doesn’t touch on in this interview and why you can see some variation between pitchers, is that there’s a part of the kinetic chain that you cannot strengthen: Tendons and ligaments. They are as strong and (mostly) as flexible as they are, and it’s primarily genetic, and there isn’t a lot of variation. Not only in baseball, but also in many other professional sports you see an increase in tendon/ligament injuries in recent decades (say, ACL and MCL failures, UCL injures in throwers, even achilles injuries), and you see less muscular injuries (like, say, hamstrings). Because once the muscle becomes strong enough, the point of failure in the kinetic chain is the tendon or ligament instead of the muscle, and there’s nothing you can do to meaningfully strengthen them.
Some people are blessed with stretchier or hardier ligaments. Those people withstood the heavier use we’ve seen in the past.
There are pitchers today who could do that. But there are many others who can’t, but who, if they are protected to a certain extent, can still contribute valuable innings on a baseball diamond. Look at this game last night: Walker Buehler was just about as dominant as you can see a pitcher in a MLB game. He threw less than 100 pitches. Bu the end of the 6th inning, even though he struck out the side, his velocity was down about 2 mph from the start of the game. This is a significant sign of fatigue! The Dodgers removed him because they’re not willing to risk him. A Walker Buehler who can do that is too valuable, and you would rather have 3 or 4 Walker Buehlers who can go 6 innings than break 3 of them and find the one who is a freak like Nolan Ryan and can pitch forever. If there was a way to figure that out without breaking the other 3, teams would do it. But there’s not, at least right now.
We have 30 teams and we ask pitchers to throw much, much harder than we did 60 years ago. Guys like Bob Gibson might have been able to air it out to 98 if they wanted to, but they did not sit there and throw 60 fastballs each at 98 mph at maximum effort in every start for 300 innings. But that’s how guys pitch now – and they have to, because you see what happens to guys who don’t. 30 years ago, any right-handed pitcher who could break 90 mph was a hard thrower and 93-94 was elite velocity. Now, 93-94 is average velocity for a right hander, and it’s improbable and rare to find a pitcher who can succeed in MLB while throwing fastballs below 90 mph.
The continued push to higher levels of human athleticism has crossed over the bound where both pitchers need extreme velocity and movement in order to compete in MLB, because the hitters are so good at handling it, and where that in turn puts them in situations where their ligaments and tendons will fail before their muscles do most of the time.
Another way to think about this is that while you know about Ryan and Gibson and Koufax, in most cases you don’t know about the guys who didn’t make it – the guys who were great for a season or two and just blew out their arms and never returned because we didn’t have the medical science we do now to fix their shoulders and elbows and bring them back. And, still, we know Koufax more or less pitched himself into retirement by battling through just these kinds of injuries – pitching through extreme pain and tendon/ligament damage in his elbow to the point that his arms aren’t the same length anymore (no, seriously, look it up).
MLB teams wisely don’t consider the attrition of all those lost arms to be worth finding the guys who can survive it, and nor do the individual players because, for most of them, they’ll turn out not to be the unicorn.
House does a bit of a disservice here but not talking about the tendons and ligaments part of the process, but it’s also true he’s working on/advertising an app aimed at younger players – who aren’t yet strong enough to have these kinds of problems. It’s only elite athletes at the collegiate level or higher who reach levels of muscular development that are high enough that their muscles are strong enough to tear their own tendons and ligaments.
You have put forth the best response to my side of the debate I have read. The teams will not take a chance on finding out who the unicorns are!!!! Your points are very logical. I agree completely with your statement that teams would rather have three or four 6 inning guys rather than find out who the Gibson or Seaver or Ford is. The argument over whether it is velocity or max effort that leads to arms breaking down is still not settled. Since there is no alternative universe it is impossible to know why Matt Harvey or , the very young Anderson Espinoza, when lame but I do not see any appreciable decline in the number of pitchers breaking down early in their careers. The only difference is that they can now be rehabilitated. Maybe you are right when you said that the players themselves are afraid to find out if they are great and are just happy to get a big paycheck, which is why I mentioned Trevor Bauer and have a great respect for him. There were no big paychecks when the pitchers themselves sorted out who was able to survive the rigors that was pitching then and became the men we revere today. All I am trying to say is that if this is the modern way the game is going to be played then the game of baseball has been diminished.
I agree completely with both bosoxforlife and mikejunt. Valid points all. I’d like to add my own observations.
1. Johnny Sain was famous for not asking his pitchers to run, He wasn’t training track stars, he was training pitchers.. While his pitchers might have loved him for it, Johnny was wrong. Note that thick-legged pitchers have been notoriously durable over the years, and have been amongst the hardest throwers. Seaver, Schilling, & Clemens stand out. Simply, letting the thick leg muscles provide more force in a pitcher’s delivery is a good thing for their arm.
2. Long-levered pitchers also tend to do well. Palmer, Johnson, and Sale fall into this group. Think golf. You have a 42″ driver and a 44″ driver. If you swing both with the same hand speed, the longer driver will hit the ball farther. Yes, it’ll be harder to control… same with pitching. So many kids are taught to throw from behind their head these days, and it makes sense because it’s easier to control where the ball goes. But to throw a baseball a given velocity, the guy who lengthens his levers will do so with less effort. Pitchers are taught a compact delivery these days, and that’s fine, but a compact delivery also shortens their levers. Think back to pitchers of a generation ago. They mostly all used a full windup, not a glorified stretch windup. Not saying we need to go back, just don’t forget to lengthen the levers.
3. House makes a valid point about how a pitcher dissipates the energy of his motion. I’d ask you to contrast Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez. Pedro’s deceleration was violent and led to his shoulder problems later in his career. Schilling, in contrast, let that right arm naturally flow all the way past his left knee. Way less stressful.
4. I mentioned Sale, and while he was/is a long-lever guy, he also gets himself into what I’ve heard called a “Reverse-W” position in mid-windup. I can’t explain it, but watch his delivery frame by frame and it’ll jump out at you. Reverse-W guys almost inevitably end up with elbow problems.
5. Having been in and around the game for 50+ years now, I remain a firm believer that you build up your throwing muscles best by… throwing! Nolan Ryan also espouses this, so be skeptical about me, but don’t diss Nolan. Practice the way you’ll throw in a game. No long-toss. No weighted ball. No footballs. Throw baseballs from 60-90 feet. 75% effort max.
To summarize, throw more, lengthen the levers, build up the legs, and be efficient (landing foot in line with) where you’re throwing to – the plate.
This part stood out to me.
“Some people are blessed with stretchier or hardier ligaments. Those people withstood the heavier use we’ve seen in the past.”
This is topic that is rarely discussed. I’ve often wondered how Nolan Ryan, Gaylord Perry, and Bert Blyleven were able to pitch so much? The 1960’s-70’s was a time of terrible abuse of starting pitchers. This era showed that for most pitchers 300+ inning seasons destroys arms. Koufax retired at age 30. Don Drysdale retired at age 32. Juan Marichal dropped off a cliff after age 31. Yet, Ryan, Blyleven, and Perry pitched huge amount of innings. Ryan and Perry both pitched well over 5,000 career innings. Blyleven would have pitched over 5,000 innings if it were not for the 1981 strike. I suspect that their ligaments and tendons were “hardier”.
Nice read. I was a Tom House student 20 or so years ago. Iirc the towel drill came from him as well. He lost face with the whole Mark Prior debacle (perfect mechanics etc) so it is nice to see him rebound. I have certainly heard his name more recently then I did for quite a while.