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July 20, 2006

Prospectus Q&A

Tom House

by Jason Grady

BP recently visited with Tom House at the National Pitching Association (NPA) lab in San Diego and observed him instructing some youngsters at his mini-camp. One of those students, Aaron Cross, is a ten-year-old who has been working with House since age six. Among other things, House has taught Cross to throw a hammer curve properly. In addition to seeing Cross and other youngsters, we also got a chance to see NPA's high-speed motion analysis system.

Baseball Prospectus: You last spoke to BP a couple of years ago. Just to get started, what’s new at NPA since then?

Tom House: Probably our relationship with Titleist golf. They have 30,000 golfers in the computer with the same technology we have, which is a significantly larger sample than our 447 major league pitchers. But the similarities between a golf swing, batting, and pitching are unbelievable. By looking at what they’ve done with their golf signature and looking at what we’ve been doing, I think we’re finally realizing you pretty much leave the gene pool alone and you position the gene pool on the rubber to accommodate what that youngster does--throwing across his body, striding straight or straight slightly open--and you spend time teaching timing than you do mechanical changes. If you change a pitcher’s signature, you run the risk of diminishing what his gene pool might be capable of doing. So, what you need to understand--and it’s hard--is just give an individual better timing with what he does genetically. We also have to be strong enough and flexible enough to handle the pitch totals that are being asked out of them because without strength to support workloads, mechanics will come apart.

You’ll have in hand the state-of-the-art stuff we have. We actually compare a pitcher’s signature and golfer’s signature in the books. And what Doug [Thorburn] is going to show you, we have in the computer an eight-year-old all the way up to the superstars, and the signatures are the same. It’s scary. It kind of makes irrelevant most of what we pitching coaches have been teaching for the last 50 years… with good intentions.

BP: The overarching purpose of our discussion today is to talk pitching mechanics, particularly safety in youth pitching. Are there any particular points you’d like to open up with in that regard?

TH: With youth pitchers, breaking balls and split fingers are high-risk pitches if thrown improperly. To abstain from throwing them is probably the safest thing to do, but it will put the development of pitchers in the United States way behind what’s going on in Latin America and the Pacific Rim. I’m a proponent of teaching the right way, biomechanically, and of strength training to support the mechanics and then making sure pitch totals and pitch ratios reflect what research says are the correct ratios. In other words, if you keep pitch totals and the ratio of fastballs, breaking balls, split-finger or change-ups at the numbers we’ve generated, which are 60-65% fastballs, 20-25% breaking balls and 15-20% change-ups… if you keep those ratios and the number of pitches per inning and per game, which have already been researched and understood worldwide, then the risk of injury while developing command of the breaking ball and split-finger is minimized. So with better information and instruction, I think we can do the same thing as abstinence.