The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (19 page)

Ground zero in the quarterback
coaching world was a dark weight room set underneath the left-field bleachers of Dedeaux Field, the USC baseball stadium. Here, a sixty-six-year-old man in a hooded sweatshirt gave lectures while seated on a large lime green exercise ball. On a particularly crisp Thursday morning in early December, the audience was a dozen pitchers, three New York Yankees’ front-office executives, a javelin thrower, a junior college quarterback, and one female golfer.

The man in the sweatshirt in front of the group had salt-and-pepper hair, a bristly mustache, and a wry grin. Tom House looked a lot like the brainier of the Smothers brothers. In the 1970s, House pitched in the Major Leagues for almost a decade with the Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox, and Seattle Mariners. He finished his career with a 29–23 record and a solid 3.79 ERA, although he was best known in his baseball career for something that happened off the mound. In 1974, as a twenty-seven-year-old relief pitcher with the Braves, House was standing in the Atlanta bullpen when teammate Hank Aaron whacked his record-breaking 715th home run over the outfield wall. House barely had to move to catch it. If he didn’t reach up, the ball would’ve clunked him right in the forehead.

House began his lecture by asking each of the pitchers in the room what was the hardest they’d ever thrown a baseball. They went around the room, touting numbers that would make baseball scouts’ hearts race: 98 miles per hour, 98, 97, 95, 92, 97, 98.

Even seated on a group of weight benches in a loose semicircle around the former Major Leaguer, it was obvious the pitchers dwarfed the 5′9″ House. He nodded to the Yankees front-office guy sitting with two colleagues, asking, “You’re having your big meeting tomorrow. What’re the three things you look for?”

There was a five-second pause.

“I’ll help you out with the first one,” House said. “Pitchability.”

“Yeah, right,” the Yankees personnel guy replied. “Stuff. We’re always looking for command, control. Deception. I’d guess athleticism. Being able to repeat it.”

House: “And then velocity, right?”

“Oh, yeah, velocity is last.”

“Here’s something that I know pisses you off, Tommy,” House said in the direction of a lanky 6′5″ career minor league pitcher in his late twenties who was moonlighting as a substitute teacher. “My best was 82 [mph]. I got nine years in the big leagues. I signed before they had [radar/speed] guns, or I would’ve never signed. What are the three kinds of velocity? Do you have any idea? If not, that’s OK. That’s why we’re here.”

The minor leaguer House was speaking to answered, “Perceived?”

“How it looks to the hitter?” said another pitcher.

He called on another guy, who proceeded to guess.

“It’s how [the hitter’s] brain interprets the speed of the pitch based on his experience with the previous pitch?” ventured another pitcher.
“An 88-mile-per-hour fastball up and in is actually 92 to the hitter’s eye. Down the middle of the plate is actually 88. Down all the way is …”

“Real close,” House said. “That’s a B-plus. It’s 6 (miles per hour), not 3, not 4. Basically an 86-mile-per-hour fastball down the middle is 92 up and in and 80 down and away. Guys like me have to pitch backwards. What does pitching backwards mean?”

One of the Yankees personnel people who should have been well-versed in the answer offered up with a hint of hesitation in his voice, “Starting soft? In hitter’s counts, throwing soft, and in advantage counts, throwing hard. If I was behind in the count, I’d throw a changeup.”

House responded by asking, “What’s a lockout pitch?” House was big on answering questions with more questions and also liked responding to answers with more questions even before letting people know if their answer was right or even on the right track. His ability to survive in the majors by keeping people off balance had not diminished with age.

“The only reason I pitched in the big leagues is because I was left-handed and could throw a curveball,” House told me a few minutes before starting his lecture. “If I was right-handed, I wouldn’t have pitched past high school. There’s a level of talent that has to be there, but with that talent, the ceiling is pretty high.”

House became a Major League pitching coach after his playing career ended when he was released at the age of thirty-one. In the past three decades, he had shepherded the pitching careers of everyone from Nolan Ryan to Randy Johnson and is the co-founder of the National Pitching Association. House, who wore glasses while on the mound in his big league career, had earned a PhD in performance psychology, a Master’s degree in marketing, an MBA, written almost two dozen books, and was now known to many in the sports world as “The Professor.” “Sports are games of failure, coached by negative people in a misinformation environment,” he told me. “These guys are surviving in spite of themselves.”

Baseball is the biggest game of failure out there, followed by hockey, in House’s view. “You can make a million dollars in a month as a hitter and fail seven out of ten times. Pitchers fail half the time.
In all sports, there’s a lot of good intentions but not a whole lot of science-based information. We call it, ‘Fail Fast Forward.’ The guys who get ahead are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, but they don’t fail the same way too often. The fear of failure—especially with smart, middle-class, white kids—is usually what holds them back, because they are so afraid to screw up.

“I was blessed because I was right in the crease between what they called the Old School and what is now the New School. Yogi Berra said it best when he said ‘50 percent of baseball is 90 percent mental.’ I saw guys with great tools who never made it because of what was going on between the ears. I went ahead and got my PhD in science because too many guys were failing with mental, emotional issues, and I had no clue what to do. I figured if I could bring in some academic help, maybe that’d give me some direction on what to do with my practical experience.”

WHETHER SOMEONE IN HIS
weight room had provided a correct answer or not, House kept volleying questions at the group.

“Anyone know who Warren Spahn was?”

Silence.

“Big old bowlegged guy with a dip in his mouth,” House said. “Smelled like a goat, couldn’t trap a pig in a ditch, winningest left-hand pitcher in baseball.”

“House, get over here!”
House said, his voice deepening as he imitated Spahn, right down to pretending he was spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice. “Don’t throw a short-armed man in. Or a long-armed man away. You gotta be before the bat. Or after the bat. You just can’t be during the bat.”

“I thought, what the fuck is this guy talking about? I didn’t have hard [a good fastball]. I had to make my fastball look better. So when you say you throw 98? Awesome, but it’s not 98. Anybody remember the Julio Franco story?”

No one in the weight room knew the Julio Franco story. And it was probably better that way for House—and for everyone else in attendance. Franco, a three-time All-Star and former American League
batting champ from the Dominican Republic, reportedly used to take batting practice with a weighted donut still on the bat while in the cage. In baseball circles, there was something of a mythology rooted in Franco’s, um, machismo. Franco played for the Texas Rangers from 1989 to ’93, at the same time House was the team’s pitching coach.

“So we’re at old Arlington Stadium. Good old days. It’s a rainout. Everyone’s talking. And Julio likes to talk.
‘Da’ big boy
,
’ ”
House said with a Latino accent as he took his palm and started pounding his chest.
“ ‘He could hit hundred thuuuur-tee mi’ per hour fass-bo
.’

“So the other guys are, like, ‘No chance. No way.’ Everyone started throwing money onto the table. Pretty soon there’s four grand. We go down to the cages and put the JUGS [pitching machine] up to 130.

“
Whhhooosssssh!
It’s bouncing off the back wall like I’ve never seen. And Julio swung that forty-ounce monster bat. He fouls the first one off and then fouls the second one off. Then he starts making contact and starts ripping it. Then,” House continued, his eyebrows arching in astonishment, “he starts moving closer to the machine. And before you know it, he’s hitting 130-mph fastballs from ten feet in front of home plate.

“How?

“Timing,” House said, answering another of his own questions. “Sequencing and mechanical efficiency,” he added before breaking back into the Franco-Latino accent, “If I know a fastball’s coming, I can hit a
boo-lettt.
”

TOM HOUSE WAS IN
his mid-fifties before his coaching career found a new industry. Or, more specifically, the new industry found him. Whitfield’s old mentor in San Diego, Cam Cameron, then the offensive coordinator for the Chargers, was at a local basketball camp with his three sons (ages eight, six, and four), where House’s name kept coming up. That got Cameron—himself once a multisport athlete in college at Indiana University as a quarterback for Lee Corso’s football team and as a guard on Bob Knight’s basketball team—curious.

“Tom’s remarkable,” Cameron said. “I’d heard about his baseball
work, so I went on the Internet to learn more about him. Then I read his books.”

Cameron showed up with his kids to watch House conduct one of his workouts in the San Diego area. Cameron was amazed as he watched House coaching Major League pitchers, guys rehabbing, high schoolers, and even Little Leaguers.

“He was everything I’d read and heard about, so I mentioned him to Brian Schottenheimer, our quarterback coach, and said, ‘Why don’t we introduce [Chargers starting QB] Drew [Brees] to Tom and see if they hit it off.’

“Eventually, we just said, ‘Hey, Drew, we’re not suggesting Tom. Just meet him. You might be interested.’ And those two formed a bond that’s been tremendous.”

House asked Brees what he thought he needed, strength-wise, to be a great quarterback.

“I guess I need a strong arm and strong legs for power,” Brees replied. House said from looking at Brees, he could tell the Chargers quarterback lacked some back-side shoulder strength.

“You’re very front-loaded,” House explained. “You have more muscle in the front of your shoulder than in the back, which has created an imbalance.” House added that if the front of Brees’s shoulder was strong enough to throw a ball 100 miles per hour, but the back could only muster 80, he was only going to throw 80, since you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Brees was amazed that House could ID all that just from observing his posture.

House also examined Brees’s diet. The former Purdue star thought he ate well, since he rarely touched fast food, but House had him take a food-allergy test. He had Brees and his wife fly up to Portland to see a specialist. The test revealed that Brees was, in fact, allergic to nuts, dairy, wheat, and eggs—many of the things he was eating, which caused him to often feel fatigued and have problems sleeping. House overhauled Brees’s diet as well as his musculature and, in the process, his throwing mechanics.

House has an acronym for his process: “STATT”—Screen Test Access and Then Training.

“First, we got him healthy,” House said. “We were far [enough]
along with baseball to know you can only accelerate what you can decelerate. We had a mechanical model that was balance and posture and weight shift, opposite and equal. These things that were translating. Football and pitching are pretty similar, only a little bit different timing. We just took the pitching model and overlaid it on quarterbacking. Did a lot of mirror work, got him on the computer, and we did everything we do with pitchers. Problem identification is half the solution.

“Football players are more dynamic, but the same rules apply. Instead of it being a six-foot stride, they have a two-foot stride, so their timing and the foot strike has to be about one-third, but after the front foot hits—whether somebody’s chasing them or not—it takes .25 to .35 [seconds] to get the football out of your hand, and you have to do it with balance and posture. All the same things apply. So with pitching, it’s a very stable environment; with rubber and mound, it’s a very unstable environment, but all the same rules apply with dynamic movement as they do with static movement.”

Brees’s transformation was startling. In his 2010 book titled
Coming Back Stronger
, Brees detailed how he’d once lacked confidence and was afraid of making mistakes. He went from throwing 11 touchdowns and 15 interceptions with a 58 percent completion rate in 2003 to a 27 TD-7 INT year with a 66 percent completion rate that earned him a Pro Bowl invite in 2004. He went on to make seven Pro Bowl appearances in the next nine seasons, even overcoming major shoulder surgery.

“It was easy,” House said. “I’d like to say we helped him a lot, but percentage points is what we did with him.

“That was two years, and then he got hurt during his free-agent year, and then we really got serious. Dr. [James] Andrews did the surgery and the rehab, and he wasn’t sure how he’d throw again. So we pulled out all the stops. And that was the beginning of Functional Fitness for Quarterbacks, just like we did for baseball. And then from there, Drew has success, he mentions my name here and there, and that leads to Tom Brady and Matt Cassel and Joe Flacco. We don’t market. It’s just word of mouth.”

House would like to say he had the foresight to know that this other avenue—training elite quarterbacks—was out there, but he said he didn’t. “A blind squirrel can find an acorn,” he said. And, as a lifelong baseball guy, he isn’t too proud to note the differences he found after working with both pitchers and QBs.