Tanner Houck Addresses His 2019 FanGraphs Scouting Report

Tanner Houck has had a tough start to his 2024 season. Prior to going on the injured list in mid-May with an elbow strain, the 28-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander logged an 8.04 ERA over nine mostly tumultuous outings. His track record shows that he is far better. Houck’s year-to-year consistency has been a bit on the uneven side, but he nonetheless possesses a 3.97 ERA and a 3.71 FIP since reaching the big leagues in 2020. Last season was his best. A mainstay in Boston’s rotation, he made a career-high 30 starts and put up 3.9 WAR and a 3.12 ERA.

His future role was in question when our 2019 Red Sox Top Prospects list was published in January of that year. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel explained at the time, some scouts preferred the 24th overall pick in the 2017 draft as a starter, while others saw him as a reliever. Our prospect analyst duo ranked the University of Missouri product fifth in the system and assigned him a 40+ FV.

What did Houck’s 2019 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric and Kiley wrote and asked Houck to respond to it.
———

“Houck was a projection prep arm from Illinois whose price was just high enough to get him to Missouri.”

“I committed to Mizzou fairly early in the process,” explained Houck, who was born in St. Louis and attended high school in nearby Collinsville, Illinois. “I really wasn’t a big prospect. I was only throwing 84-87 [mph] at the time. So that was probably a fair judgement. I definitely grew up and got stronger. I filled out my frame a little bit.

“I was always open to going to pro ball out of high school,” Houck said of his decision to go the college route. “But coming from a family of educators, they kind of preached to me from an early age that you can’t take away education. When the price wasn’t right for me, it was easy enough to turn it down and go to school.”

“He had a big freshman year there and then had a national coming-out party as the ace of Team USA that summer.”

“Looking back, I would say that my freshman year was my best year in college,” Houck said. “And then I did get the privilege of playing on that Team USA team. I was with a lot of talented individuals there.”

“Slinging in a heavy, 91-96 mph sinker from a low slot with a deceptive, crossfire delivery.”

“Yep,” the right-hander agreed. “Still pretty accurate, although I have cleaned up the delivery since then. If you go back and watch, you’ll see that I’m on the same spot on the rubber that I am now, but I landed even further closed. That was something I definitely had to clean up, for consistency’s sake.”

“Scouts who weren’t as enthusiastic about Houck’s changeup, or arm slot, or the length of his arm action, saw a reliever.”

“Yeah, I knew that I was kind of fighting an uphill battle, only really being a two-pitch pitcher in college,” Houck said. “It was two-seam [and] slider. The changeup I would flash here and there, maybe at a 5% clip. Realistically, it was easy for scouts to say that I could be a reliever. But I always knew that I had the ability to start, that I had the strength and the mentality to start. I never let that [opinion] get in my head.”

“The Red Sox had Houck change his delivery and arm action for the first half-dozen or so starts in 2018, focusing on a more traditional four-seam fastball approach. It didn’t work.”

“I mean, it was a good experiment,” Houck said of the ultimately shelved effort, which he addressed here at FanGraphs in May 2019. “I learned a lot. While I do still throw the four-seam occasionally, the arm slot got a little too high and I got inconsistent with my delivery. I just couldn’t throw strikes that way.

“The game was also in that realm of four-seams up and curveballs in the dirt at the time,” Houck added. “The game eventually flipped back over to where we see a lot more sinker-slider now. But yeah, that was pretty accurate; I definitely struggled. Then I went back to where I am now, and the rest is history.”

“We think the likely outcome here is a multi-inning power reliever who dominates righties with strikeouts and groundballs, though some see a starter in the mold of Justin Masterson.”

“Like I said, I always looked at myself as a starter; I never saw myself as a reliever,” said Houck, who except for 2022 has pitched almost exclusively in the Red Sox rotation. “I did relieve for most of that one year, but the mindset was always to get back to starting, to reach the 200-inning mark and lead the pitching staff. I had some great veterans as teammates my first few years here, with Chris Sale, Nathan Eovaldi, and Garrett Richards. Seeing how they went about their business was a great learning lesson for me in what it takes to be a big league starter.

“My favorite pitcher growing up was always A.J. Burnett, another sinkerballer guy, but [Masterson] is a pretty good comp, for sure.”

——

Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Cody Bellinger, Matthew Boyd, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Erick Fedde, Kyle Freeland, Lucas Giolito, Randal Grichuk, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman, Matthew Liberatore, Sean Newcomb, Bailey Ober, Austin Riley, Joe Ryan, Max Scherzer, Marcus Semien.