Please, Someone Fix My Tanner Houck

The Boston Red Sox bandwagon was crowded beyond the capacity limit this offseason, as you’d expect for a team that added Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet over the winter, and put two near-majors prospects in the top seven of the preseason Top 100. I confess I was a passenger on this bandwagon; it was incredibly sweaty and at least one stranger sat on my lap for a couple stops.

But for all that hype, a quarter of the way through the season the results have been a bit of a let down. Boston is right where it was last year: around .500. Disappointing as that may be, most of the individual performances by Red Sox players have been within the realm of expectation. Surely it’s a bummer that Jarren Duran and Walker Buehler have only been about average this year, for instance, but I don’t know that it’s a monumental shock in either case.

The one player whose numbers are really knocking me out of my chair right now is Tanner Houck.

A hard-throwing giant with a funky delivery who’d tantalized but only delivered intermittently beforehand, Houck was a legit front-of-the-rotation force in 2024. He was in the top 25 in the league in innings pitched, and in the top 15 among qualified starters in ERA, FIP, and WAR.

Among qualified starters this year, Houck is tied for last in WAR, second-to-last in FIP, and last (by more than two runs) in ERA. Houck had the lowest HR/9 in the American League in 2024, allowing just 11 dingers in 178 2/3 innings. This year, Houck has already given up 10 homers in just 43 2/3 innings. He’s being taken deep so often opposing hitters are calling him Professor Aronnax behind his back.

On April 14, Houck got absolutely wrecked by the Rays: 12 runs (11 earned) in just 2 1/3 innings pitched. Houck allowed home runs in each of the first two innings, and then it all fell apart in a nine-run third. In this case, Houck didn’t even allow an extra-base hit in the third, but five singles, a walk, an RBI groundout, a wild pitch, an error, and a stolen base will do the trick.

Insofar as it’s possible to not pitch that badly and still give up 11 runs, I kind of think that’s what happened to Houck. It was just a garden variety bad start until things snowballed on him in the third, and that was mostly bad sequencing and not-particularly-hard-hit balls finding holes.

When this goes for a single, you know it’s not your day:

Luck notwithstanding, it was a historically bad day at the office. It was just the 21st outing in major league history, and only the 14th start, in which a pitcher surrendered 11 or more earned runs on 12 or more baserunners in less than three innings pitched. Before Houck’s rough night in Tampa, nobody had suffered such a fate since Jordan Yamamoto in 2020.

The fact that Houck got torched like that was, somewhat counterintuitively, a vote of confidence from manager Alex Cora. If he were some emotionally fragile rookie or a physically fragile spot starter, he would surely have been removed before the scoreboard bled into football territory. But Houck is a hoss, and sometimes the hoss has to wear it. By the time it gets to 8-0 in the third inning, the game is lost basically no matter what. Cora obviously believed that Houck could bear the physical and emotional burden of squeezing out a couple more outs to save the bullpen.

Houck clearly flushed it and moved on. He threw at least six innings in both starts on either side of the George M. Steinbrenner Field Massacre, without skipping a start or anything. On May 1, Houck put in his best start of the season to date: seven full innings with four hits and no walks allowed, against six strikeouts. All the damage came off a solo homer. Maybe everything was returning to normal.

Then, on Monday night, it happened again. Not quite a carbon copy of the first nightmare outing, but 11 more earned runs on the same number of combined walks and hits (12) and the same number of outs recorded (seven). That ignoble pitching line, which had popped up less than two dozen times in major league history before Houck came along, had now been achieved twice in a month by the same guy.

Take away those two terrible starts, and Houck’s seasonal stats don’t look that bad. Removing 22 earned runs and only 14 outs would do wonders for anyone’s ERA. But judging a pitcher by figure skating rules (i.e. dropping the low score) is misleading at the best of times. When the two historically abysmal outings make up nearly a quarter of the pitcher’s corpus, they can’t be ignored.

The thing with Houck is he’s huge, and he throws hard from a weird arm slot. He came out of the University of Missouri when you had to be 6-foot-6 and throw 97 to pitch there; he was a college teammate of Pete Fairbanks and Bryce Montes de Oca, if you want some context. (Don’t ask what’s happened to Mizzou’s baseball program since; it’ll only upset you.)

The key to Houck is everything he throws has wicked movement. He’s got a sinker with above-average arm-side movement and elite, well, sink, and a splitter that comes in about 5 mph slower with similar movement. Guys with similar sinker movement to Houck include Zach Eflin, Yennier Cano, and Logan Webb. Slower still is the sweeper, whose average horizontal movement differs from the sinker by 31 inches.

With mid-90s velocity and that kind of movement, you’d expect Houck to get a lot of strikeouts — throw a dollar in the swear jar if you’ve ever described him as a “righty Chris Sale” — but he doesn’t. He doesn’t really walk that many guys at this stage of his career. But because everything he throws drops more than average, he got just a huge number of groundballs. I mentioned the low home run rate, but last year Houck was also one of only five qualified starters to post a GB/FB ratio higher than 2.00. (The other four: Webb, Max Fried, Cristopher Sánchez, and the free space, Framber Valdez.)

This year, Houck is still a groundball pitcher, but those extra batted balls in the air are just killing him:

According to Baseball Savant, 19.5% of Houck’s batted balls this year have been pulled in the air (which is where the home runs come from), up from just 11.5% last year.

Some of Houck’s struggles are small-sample-related. They have to be; he’s running an 8.00 ERA now, for God’s sake. The Red Sox could run Aaron Sele out there every fifth day — current, 54-year-old Aaron Sele — and get better than an 8.00 ERA.

But there are two things I’ve noticed from Houck so far this year that bear mentioning. The first is that while Houck’s starting point on the rubber is unchanged from 2024, his arm angle is down ever so slightly. Dropping his release point by about three inches hasn’t changed the movement on his pitches much, and if that were the problem, I bet the Red Sox would’ve noticed and changed something before Houck had his second 11-earned run start of the season. But it’s notable.

The second thing is something I’m sure they’ve noticed. Over the course of his career, Houck has thrown all manner of fastballs along with his sinker; a cutter here, a four-seamer there. He was sinker-only in 2024, and had the best season of his career.

This year, he’s worked a four-seamer back in a few times a start, mostly as a chase pitch up and out of the zone. I get the logic; if everything Houck throws sinks, it’d be good to sprinkle in another pitch with some rise so you can climb the ladder once every few innings. Just to keep hitters honest.

Except it absolutely stinks. Houck has thrown 34 of 44 fastballs outside the strike zone this year, and hitters have swung at only seven of those; five of those were fouled off, not swung and missed at entirely.

See, Houck’s four-seamer is like everything else he throws; it sinks more than the average pitch of that type would. So while Houck’s four-seamer comes in with movement the batter doesn’t expect for a four-seamer, it looks a lot like the most milquetoast, hittable sinker you’ll find. So when it does end up in the zone, hitters are just clobbering it. It’s like he’s dodging an oncoming car and leaping right into the path of a train.

Hitters have put four Houck four-seamers in play so far this year, resulting in two home runs, a line drive single, and a routine fly ball out off the bat of Joc Pederson, early in the year when Pederson couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.

Here’s a fun fact for you: When Houck puts a four-seamer in the zone at any point during a plate appearance this year, opponents are 7-for-8 with two walks, two doubles, and two home runs. By Baseball Savant’s run value metric, Houck has already cost himself four runs by throwing his four-seamer. On a per-pitch basis, it’s the 12th-worst individual offering in the entire league (minimum 40 pitches).

I don’t want to act like Houck’s entire problem is a pitch he throws 5.9% of the time. For instance, opponents hit .194 off his splitter last year; this year, they’re hitting .425. But the journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step, and if I were Houck the first step I’d take is this: Stop throwing the four-seamer.