House Call: Why the World's Best Pitchers and Quarterbacks Seek This Man's Advice

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out.

I am Pablo Torre.

Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings.

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And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour.

I've done it a bunch of times with pitchers

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The superlative, Tom.

The superlative that you deserve is the foremost expert on throwing in the world.

I do, though, before we get to throwing, want to start with a time you caught something.

Okay.

And as a way of introducing you, I presume you have a general guess as to which day of your life.

It would probably be April 8th, 1974.

I think it was about 8:06 p.m.

We'll see what Downing does.

Al at the belt delivers, and he's low, ball one.

And that just adds to the pressure.

The crowd booing.

A fastball from Al Downing to Henry Aaron.

Sutton goes back to the Fan City Storm.

At number 715, the only thing I can remember is thinking to myself,

it's coming to me.

What a marvelous moment for baseball.

What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia.

What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.

And then I went blank.

The world was waiting for this, obviously.

Back to the fan city star.

And there you are.

Right under the think of it as money sign.

So when we drew straws as the bullpen guys on where we wanted to be, it was basically analytics before our time.

It came exactly where, if Downing made a mistake, that was where it's going to go.

If I would have stood still, it would have hit me right in the forehead.

So it wasn't a great catch.

I caught the ball.

Bill Buckner said, how's he?

Give it to me.

Give it to me.

I said, no.

That's history that you're catching.

A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south.

Then running into home plate, I got there, kind of dozed through the pile, and I put the ball up in front of his face.

His mom and he were hugging.

And he took the ball, said, thanks, kid, and I got pushed out of the equation.

But people don't realize he was getting death threats and his mom was hugging him because she was going to take the bullet.

They had to peel her off of him.

People don't realize that.

She is his bodyguard at that moment.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I didn't realize that.

The guy there with the long hair and the big 70s goggles on.

Shooter's glasses.

Shooter's glasses.

Did that guy have a sense that he would become the greatest authority, the greatest, most respected thinker and coach on the subject of throwing things in the history of sports?

No, I had no clue at all.

So I'm just going to assume that you have no clue who the man I'm talking to is, but what I need you to understand is that to be a quarterback or a pitcher at the highest possible level is all about precision physics under public pressure.

which is, in other words, a marriage between mechanics and mind.

And so when the best throwers in the world need help with that marriage, what they do is make a house call.

Because Dr.

Tom House is the only psychologist who is also a major leaguer and also the author of 22 books.

A man whose clientele spans both football and baseball, from Tom Brady to Greg Maddox to Drew Brees to Nolan Ryan to Andrew Luck to Randy Johnson to Tim Tebow and on and on and on and on.

And typically, Tom House is a background character in the lives of these very famous people.

Not unlike that video of Hank Aaron that we showed you.

For instance, you may have missed Tom House being name-checked by Eli Manning when Eli went viral for imitating the hip thrust routine of Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott on ESPN.

It's the Tom House stuff, Peyton.

You know, here, I'll show you, Paige.

It's about creating torque.

Right?

It's like it's about creating, you know, close the left hip, open up that right hip, close the left shoulder, open up the hip.

But when I touched base with Tom recently while I was out in LA, what I found out immediately was that Dr.

Tom House is in a different mood these days.

At age 77, he is finally ready to fire off some takes.

If you didn't know who they were, and you didn't know how they worked a game, you would pick Eli over Payton every time.

And so what I wanted to do today was climb into Tom House's brain.

I wanted to find out why all of these elite athletes, including the kids, continue to trust this weird PhD who likes teaching his pitchers to throw footballs, for instance, and whose own fastball, if it can even be called that, could not crack 85 miles an hour at Tom's peak.

I think in today's game, I wouldn't have been able to even go to junior college because I didn't throw hard, but because of this guy Sandy Koufax

I'm sure you might recognize that name familiar with that I brought it up the other day and the kids didn't even know who I was talking about oh man he when the Dodgers came out in 1962 or 63 they played in the Coliseum but they did camps around the LA area close to where I grew up and I was at the clinic and as the day was winding down, Sandy Koufax walked by me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, what's your name, son?

I said, Tommy House.

He said, Tommy House, you have a big league curveball.

Let me tell you about curveballs.

There are good curveball hitters, but nobody hits a good curveball.

You keep throwing that pitch.

I'll see you in the big leagues in four years.

He was right.

That's like having Michelangelo come by and say, by the way, you're pretty good with this painting.

And you know what that did for me?

I put up up numbers well enough to be able to hang out with a big league pension.

What was the moment in your career when you began to think this isn't working out for me the way that I hoped it would?

As a player?

Yeah.

It started in Boston.

Don Zimmer brought me in a game to face a guy named Chris Shambliss.

Yankee.

Yankee.

Who I had gotten out 35 out of 40 times.

And Zim gave me the ball in a tight game and said I don't give a darn what you do don't let him take you deep

and there's a long drive deep the right field back is Evans and the ball game is over

and before Zim's fanny hit the bench it was upper deck game over and

walk off

and that was the beginning

I didn't pitch for 42 days after that.

The joy of going to the ballpark every day kind of got diminished a little bit when I knew I was in the doghouse and was probably never going to get a chance to work out of it.

There's a quote from Don Zimmer, manager of the Red Sox, your old boss.

He said, quote,

I think a lot of his problems were mental.

He wanted so much to do well for us.

It seemed as though the harder he tried, the worse he got.

It was exactly right.

I thought too much and I cared too much.

And that combination is a performance anxiety problem.

So I became a defensive pitcher

for about

six months to a year after leaving Boston.

And until I got involved with the research on performance anxieties, did I figure out a way that even a guy with my limited abilities could actually manufacture and do better with these particular protocols?

And that became the beginning of my research into the PhD program.

So you get a Ph.D.

in sports psychology after you retire from baseball.

Your career as a left-handed pitcher professionally is done.

You go to grad school.

And that part,

you had what kind of reaction from your folks?

Neither my mom nor my dad could understand how anybody could make a living playing sports.

In fact, on her deathbed, my mom looked me in the face and she said, now, Thomas, when are you going to find a real job?

Seriously, they enjoyed coming to the games, but her number one priority for my brother and myself, no A,

no play.

If you want to play sports, you have to have straight A's.

And you can play sports as long as you go to school.

That's why I went to school till I was 44.

What's up, listeners?

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I certainly dreamed big.

I think when we were all kids, we dreamed big.

Whether we wanted to be astronauts, presidents.

Personally, I wanted to be a pitcher for the then Florida Marlins.

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I want to speed run through a very long and colorful and frankly insane career.

But you get to the Rangers, you get the position fundamentally of

guy who's supposed to help these pitchers learn how to throw.

And you do weird shit.

Really weird.

They were on a limited budget with a franchise that was barely hanging on.

Tom Greed, as the GM, was one of those GMs that said, we know what doesn't work for us.

Let's try something new.

So I mortgaged my house to get an aerial system, and we brought it into Ranger Stadium, and we captured data.

Every hitter, every pitcher that went through there.

We're talking about cube and high-speed motion analysis.

And we had two years of data.

We've got measurements coming out of our yin-yang.

What is it that we have?

I said, you know, everybody's trying to film a million pictures and see what they do.

Let's narrow our sample down to 30 of the best.

It's a stepwise regression analysis.

And we found nine variables, starting with balance and posture, that were dependent on anybody that wanted to throw strikes with health.

And that was the year that we finished second.

And that'll do it.

Yankees in the ninth inning, no runs, and two men left on base.

And the final score, the Texas Rangers, seven and the Yankees, two.

The throwing the football thing, the idea that here were the Texas Rangers looking like morons, throwing a football on the field before games.

A key break with tradition was the use of footballs to improve baseball throwing skills.

What flipped?

When did that begin to get buy-in from both the team that you worked for and then broadly?

broadly.

When Nolan Ryan joined the Rangers and started throwing the football,

at least they shut up publicly.

To look at Nolan Ryan's statistics on baseball reference now is to be reminded what the last five years of his career looked like.

And it's to marvel at how the f

he got better.

I'll tell you how he did.

He embraced the new information like it was mana from heaven.

I don't have Nolan Ryan as the guy being like, I would like the PhD

nerd with the glasses to tell me how to do my job.

And in fact, when he went into the Hall of Fame, he actually mentioned that, that Tom had all these weird ideas.

But when I tried them, they worked.

I was very fortunate to have a pitcher coach by the name of Tom House.

And Tom and I are the same age, and Tom is a coach that's always on the cutting edge.

and I really enjoyed our association together and he would always come up with new training techniques and because of our friendship and Tom pushing me

I think I got in the best shape of my life during the years that I was with the Rangers and Tom I really and he literally said I was a better pitcher from age 39 to 46 than I was anytime during the previous 39 years.

So the guy who was at home played with those glasses wears these goggles in this role, but now you're Professor Gadget.

Yeah.

That's what they called you.

And so it's the biomechanical stuff.

It's the footage you were collecting, the analysis you were doing, the regressions that you were running.

This was the 80s, and you were doing this.

Think about

a tobacco chewing

coach from the 50s and 60s listening to somebody like me talk about about proprio neurofacilitation.

Can you see him?

What's he talking about?

It's a baseball.

Throw it.

About drag crisis for movement on the ball.

About spin.

Spin.

About getting it closer.

About effective velocity versus real velocity.

And

there was nothing wrong with it.

It was just before its time.

I understand that if you're going to trace this, right, Nolan Ryan to Randy Johnson, and you go down the line and your tentacles extend all throughout Major League Baseball.

And I understand how that happened now.

When does the football thing at the highest level become another part of your business?

It began before Drew Brees,

but it was rubber-stamped by Drew Brees.

Third and 14 of the night team.

Brees into the end zone.

Kirkard, did he get in?

Yes!

Touchdown, San Diego.

I thought it was going to be a metal-emotional consult, and it started off that way.

But as luck would have it, that was the season that he blew his shoulder out.

I could see that big defensive lineman land on top of him, drove his arm over his head, and then I saw Drew walking off

the field with his arm locked like this and couldn't bring it down.

And I said, oh my goodness, he's dislocated his shoulder out the bottom.

He and I spent the summer.

post-surgery in an aerobics room at the Pacific Athletic Club, just figuring out ways to make our arms work without lifting weights or throwing anything.

So that became the body work that put his shoulder back to function, to where he could throw the football.

And then the rest is history from there.

Most accurate passer passer in the history of the game.

All right.

So the word kind of gets out and people start

tapping on the door.

Alex Smith was one of them.

Yeah.

My guy.

Yeah.

Another testimonial to curiosity and someone trying to make.

So even though it was weird, they were coming by to see what was going on.

And then the quarterback that picked up for Tom Brady, the year he heard his arm,

Matt Castle, was a baseball pitcher at USC.

And he said, hey, Tom, is it okay if I bring Tom Brady by?

I said, he wants to come by.

And I said, sure.

So Tom showed up.

And it happened to be a day when I had 10-year-olds.

I think I had a javelin thrower and a golfer besides a couple of quarterbacks and a pitcher.

I just like the idea of just like it's you and a bunch of people throwing some stuff.

Exactly.

And I can remember Tom looking and going,

I'm not sure.

And as it turned out, we hooked him just because of that.

The stuff that he was doing that was new made him feel stuff in his delivery.

And one thing that people don't realize about Tom Brady, he is demanding.

When you're a coach working with him, every throw is under the microscope.

What'd you see?

I felt this.

What should I have felt?

So of all.

So you're being tested.

Oh, yeah.

And then if he didn't think I was paying attention, he'd screw something up.

Wait, wait, just to explain this, though.

So Tom Brady would tank a throw to test you whether you're paying attention.

Yes.

And what he didn't realize is that I knew that he knew.

The thing that was hardest for him to understand was his front side had to stay closed till the last possible second.

He was taught like all quarterbacks in his generation.

to pull that front side through to get more on the ball.

And it's just the opposite.

If you've got a vector going this way, you can't put force on it that way or as much spin.

Drew was extremely accurate with a base that was too broad.

He could not throw long effectively.

Tom Brady, on the other hand, could throw in the next week, but he had a base that was too narrow.

So we spent a good part of the first three years we worked together narrowing Drew Brees'

stance.

and spreading Tom Brady out and affirming Tom Brady's front side up.

They both took volumes of notes.

I think Tom told me he has 17 spiral notebooks.

Drew had 12 or 13.

And both of them, they shared in common film study.

They would look at film and look at film and look at film and look at film to where they had already played the upcoming game in their head before the game even started.

And that's an anxiety reducer and a stress reducer.

What's the biggest difference between a baseball player and a football player when it came to how you learned about their wiring and their methods?

To be honest, quarterbacks are the easiest athlete to work with.

They're used to huge amounts of data to be processed quickly and turned into action.

Pitchers, on the other hand, don't have a time clock.

Well, they do now.

But pitchers are a tough sell because they don't have to be on the spot.

They're expected to figure out how at their pace.

Someone's not trying to actively murder them at the moment.

Exactly.

Even though

a football player's fear of getting hit by a baseball is way greater than a pitcher's fear of getting hit by a linebacker.

Weird, huh?

Is that right?

Yeah.

They're afraid of the baseball.

Even though Brady could have been a big league catcher, Drew could have been a big league shortstop.

Guaranteed.

Take it to the bank.

Why are they afraid of the baseball?

I don't know.

Because it hurts.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Veeen Champain, a 14 alcoholic volume, reported by Remy Control, USA, Incorporated, New York, New York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please drink responsibly.

I want to get to the larger trend that we're seeing in baseball, which is velocity.

The average major league fastball is 93.7 miles an hour now.

I mean, I'm old enough now, Tom, to regard that as nuts.

It's crazy.

94 is the resting.

That's mediocrity.

Yeah, if you're in 93, 94,

you're lucky to be in the first three rounds of a draft.

Did you ever think that we get to a place where I'm looking at, again, the statistics here, that five pitchers last season would average 100 miles an hour?

Not to tip my own cab, but we were the original research on velocity with a two-pound, one-pound,

six, five-four, and two-ounce ball.

We both threw and held on to.

We stole that from tennis.

Tennis players never have bad shoulders on the back side because they hang on to the racket.

We took that to the training.

You're only as strong as your weakest link.

As soon as their weak lengths started getting matched up with their strong links, velocities went off the chart.

104 from Aroldis Chapman.

Strike three call, 105 on the inner edge.

Swear you're gonna miss strike three.

It was 105.5 miles an hour.

Most of the training we do for arm speed now is not done for strength.

It's done for the nervous system to understand it can make itself go faster.

And you know what the term myelinization means.

What does it mean?

You have this bank of nerves that where you're going to perform something a certain way.

And when you're doing it over and over, your brain's not stupid.

It's not going to waste time going to 80% of the stuff that doesn't contribute.

It's going to go to the things that myelinate 100 mile an hour fastball.

So these kids are reaching a point now where their arms, their central nervous system, and their ambient nervous system has been trained that 100 miles is possible.

So myelination, I am now realizing when you say myelination, it is not referring to mile as in mile per hour.

It is M-Y-E-L-I-N-A-T-I-O-N.

Exactly.

The process of forming a protective insulating layer called myelin around nerve fibers in the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Yeah.

Obviously.

Yeah.

And when you wrap that, it's a fatty tissue substance.

When you wrap it with myelin, then when

it gets to the nervous system, there's time to throw, that nervous system can go faster than if you spread it out over six or seven different spaces.

Is velocity at this point, now that it is achievable in ways and to a frequency that is kind of mind-blowing,

does it feel like it's overrated?

You still have to pitch.

Let me throw something at you can laugh at over the next few years.

We know the human arm can go 118 miles an hour.

I've done it a bunch of times with pitchers.

Can they do it for a game, a season, an inning, whatever.

Haven't figured out how yet.

The ceiling, though, is 118.

Maybe not an everyday pitcher, but it's possible.

I mean,

everything I'm looking at research-wise says it's possible.

The mechanics of Randy Johnson, the 105 guy from Cuba.

Aroldis Chapman?

Arolis Chapman.

And we looked at all those hard throwers.

And if you mixed and matched all of them, then you'd have the guy that's throwing 118 today.

But steroids that everybody beats up and rightful so because it was illegal, don't necessarily mean you can be skilled.

Did you ever do steroids, Tom?

I did.

Not because I was a genius or whatever.

I wanted to find out if what they said was true.

And I threw 84 miles an hour when I weighed 170 pounds.

I threw 84 miles an hour when I weighed 210 pounds.

So steroids didn't do anything for me except blow my knees out.

You're a bad pitch man for steroids.

The thing that amazes me is a hitter should not be able to catch up with 105 miles an hour.

Yeah, I was going to say, let's turn the camera around the other way now.

You're at the plate.

Okay, if you add together the time it takes the best hitter in the game to swing in a pitch, he should not be able to hit 105 miles an hour.

The times don't add up, but they do.

And it's this ambient nervous system where the decision to swing doesn't go to the brain.

It goes to one of the meridians in your shoulder, your elbow.

It's like when you touch a hot stove, your finger comes off before you know it's hot.

Right.

That's what's happening with hitters.

You're moving faster than your brain can actually articulate the thought.

Exactly.

And I swear to God,

when people say that hitting is the single hardest thing to do in sports,

times 10, that hitter-pitcher relationship, that dance is going to be, that's what makes baseball to me as interesting interesting as any sport that's out there.

Just fact-checking Greg Maddox, for instance, a guy you worked with who is

famed as the craftiest.

He is the Drew Brees of pitchers.

Average velocity, right?

Low 90s?

If that.

2-2, strike him out the game.

There it is.

Would like to congratulate Greg Maddox on his 3000th career strikeout.

But the genius of Greg Mannix, he threw the velocity where he had the most movement.

He could still, even in his later years, he could have thrown 95, 96, but it flattened out.

So there's three ways to get a hitter out.

You get him out with speed,

change of speed, and movement.

All right.

And he was a genius at all those.

And a fastball in at 90

is faster than a fastball away at 90 per se velocity.

One foot of distance, three miles an hour.

So, what he was was a guy that had a release point closer to home plate than any other six-foot pitcher that could make the ball move and he could change speeds.

Right.

So, the Randy Johnson thing, just as a matter of comparison, right?

His whole

architectural advantage is that he could release the ball because of his height and his wingspan closer to home plate.

Exactly.

He released the baseball 48 feet, six inches from home plate.

That's the cut of the grass in front of the mound.

And he was effectively wild.

Now, this ball, obviously, just getting away from him, but watch the reaction of John Kruck.

Would you say his heart is palpitating a bit?

And Randy doesn't mind me saying this.

They knew every pitch that Randy was throwing in his big league career.

They knew what was coming.

They knew what was coming.

But you couldn't dig in on him because he would do two sliders on the half-shell and throw one behind your head without even trying.

So he was what we call effectively wild.

The fear factor hitting off of Randy was, I'm just going to take my chances.

I don't want to know what's coming.

Yeah, various pitchers as well as birds learn that.

Exactly.

So when it comes to the competitive advantage that arises or diminishes when everybody's throwing faster and faster, and Greg Maddox, for all of his craft, is glacial in comparison.

What does this say about the future of the soft tosser?

You coached Jamie Moyer.

What goes around comes around.

Right now,

every staff in the big leagues is looking for a pitcher like Jamie Maher.

George Shortstop, easy hop for Valdez.

He's got it across the diamond in time.

Jamie Moyer at the age of 47 has thrown a two-hit shutout.

Jamie Moir was me, only really good at being me.

You just run him out there, and it may be ugly one game, but at the end of the year, he's going to give you innings.

He's going to hold games close and he's going to be productive.

You can count him.

He's never going to be on the DL.

What's the biggest problem right now with baseball?

Half the pitching staff.

Yeah, there's no durability.

So right now, in the spring trainings conversations that I have, everybody's looking for a durable right-hander or left-hander that they can literally abuse without hurting his arm.

And that's going to be someone that doesn't throw overly hard or overly soft, but knows how to pitch and can give it to you anytime you want to look at it.

So the innings eater.

The innings eater is.

You got to save your studs.

And you can't have 12 studs on a staff.

You got to have someone that can eat it so that the stud can perform.

Right.

That's where it's going.

Right.

And that's how guys like me will get back into the big leagues.

You turned Tim Tebow into a baseball player.

You wouldn't normally have this many fans or this many reporters or a news helicopter show up to cover what amounts to minor league study hall.

But they were all there Monday to see Tim Tebow make his official debut as a minor league baseball player.

Regrets, reflections?

He was 10,000 reps behind as a quarterback and the same amount as a hitter.

If he could have done one or the other,

with enough myelin,

he could have played both.

He could have been

a solid backup, but his entourage didn't merit, even though it was a good entourage, being a backup quarterback and having that many things in the clubhouse.

Everything you see about Tim is true.

But again, he was short on reps as a quarterback throwing and short on reps as a hitter, hitting.

What did you learn working with him about what it means to do your job?

What it means is when you're behind the eight ball at the elite level, it's the same thing that happened to Michael Jordan.

I imagine that turn him loose on a 3-0 count.

They do and he pops it up on the infield.

Under the ball, Zambrano makes the cut.

Michael Jordan is getting by on sheer athletic ability and hard work.

Just an average minor league baseball player when he was the best basketball player.

ever.

Michael Jordan was

probably the best athlete on the planet.

But when I threw batting practice to him, I look him right in the face and I say, as long as your is pointing down, you're not going to hit the ball in off the plate.

Long-armed man, in can't hit.

If he would have played baseball from the start, he probably could have been a really good big linger.

Could you turn someone like Lamar Jackson into a pitcher?

I'll tell you what, he's a pretty good athlete.

You just hate it when you find it on Monday and not during the game.

Jackson with look at that cut.

Look at the raven.

The Ravens down the field, and it's caught by 10.

But again,

being on a mound with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth is different than being behind center.

With 20 seconds going in the last quarter, you're out there on an island by yourself.

And I don't know if he has that makeup.

If you're a pitcher and you can't make a pitch in that situation, it's toast.

So the similar question, right, of could you turn Paul Skeens into a quarterback?

He's made it six in a row to start the day.

Paul Skeens.

No, he couldn't.

He's too wired to pitch a baseball.

Now, he throws a football.

I don't know if you're aware.

No.

But he throws a football.

Of course he does.

As part of his training program.

This is a speed round now.

Do you think Shoe Otani should keep pitching?

No.

No.

I think he's a hitter.

He's proved all he needs to throw, all he needs to to do as a pitcher.

I think his value to the ball club is on the field every day.

And

I'm going to say this with, I hope I'm wrong.

I don't think his shoulders can handle it.

What are you seeing?

there?

It's a combination of a bunch of stuff.

Primarily the thresholds with heavyweight training are really good for hitting, but not good for pitching.

And the everyday stresses of throwing down a hill, when you generate energy on flat ground, the most you can get out of flat ground is about four times body weight and foot pounds of energy.

When you're going down the mound, you get about six times body weight.

I don't think his shoulders can handle that, the deceleration.

I haven't ever worked with him.

I'm only looking from afar.

I'm looking at his mechanics are very good.

his makeup is outstanding he's a dude but i don't think his body can do both

but the pleasure i did you watch him and with awe self-evidently unprecedented right

but you're saying for his own long-term interest yes just i think

i think his hall of fame life is going to be from an everyday player

So, by this point, I think it's clear that I could talk to Dr.

Tom House and mine his brain for takes on the future of sports for an extraordinarily long time.

Tom, the more I think about it, was a pioneer.

He was using science and regressions and video analysis to evolve the art of throwing, melding it truly with rigorous psychological study, turning it all into a science.

And all this was decades before the value of that scientific analysis became self-evident and omnipresent in some form all across sports.

But the skill Tom has that is even more rare, the skill that so many data nerds still can't hack their way around, is the thing that I consider his real gift.

The gift of communication.

It's his ability to articulate what is in his head to others, to really connect with the people who are searching for his wisdom, me included.

And Tom's future in that regard is something that I wanted to find out about too.

How did you discover that you had Parkinson's?

I love to throw.

And I was, if not, I was one of the best BP pitchers in the history of baseball.

And I noticed when I was throwing BP, the ball would get away from me.

I'd throw a ball that would hit someone in the foot.

And I also noticed when I was walking that I was shuffling and leaning forward.

And I thought, okay, something's wrong.

When I got tested, thought I had a brain tumor or something.

Couldn't find anything there.

And then...

One of my best friends, we were walking toward a practice range.

He said, Tom, I think you have Parkinson's.

I said, all right,

how do I find out?

He said, call this guy.

So I got tested and I did.

And they figured out I'd been misdiagnosed for about three years.

So I've had it for about 18 years.

Wow.

And then when I figured out the prognosis, I said, this doesn't look too good for me.

And I said, okay, let's figure out what we can do.

So I took everything that I've been doing with elite sports and started throwing it it at parkinson's people and we're not curing it but we're slowing it down i like the idea of your brain being trained on that problem well if it can be figured out i'll i'll stumble into it and doctor that i was working with at the time said you know you have to it doesn't kill you but you you don't die from it you die with it but your quality of life is it's going to be harder on you than you think.

Then I found out that

dopamine is the reason we we have

Parkinson's.

If your brain stops producing dopamine, then all the symptoms like I'm showing right now, where I start to quiver and my voice goes away, that's my price to pay.

But if you can keep your dopamine up and

add in something else, they can give you synthetic dopamine, but you keep having to take more and more and more just to hold your own.

So I made up my mind, encaphalines and endorphins are basically brothers and sisters of dopamine.

It's an en.

It's an upper, it's a feel-good thing.

And they've taken my skin cells.

My skin cells are becoming the stem cells that they can inject at the base of my brain to make sure that dopamine production starts again.

I've been involved with that research for the last 12 years.

Most important thing is not to be a burden for my wife.

And the second most important thing, I've got to get what's in my head out to you kids before I punch my ticket.

You're 77 now?

I'll be 78, April 29th.

Okay.

Happy early birthday.

Thank you.

I believe that if you have just listened to this interview, you would not have necessarily known that you have been handling Parkinson's for 18 years.

So you don't notice my voice?

When you mention it, sure.

That's the good Lord paying me back for all the bullshit I did way back when.

But I read at one point, it was an interview you gave in August 2021, that you were preparing to go on vacation for the first time in your life.

Yeah.

I've been on a vacation my whole life, being able to play.

I've never worked a day in my life.

I'm playing every day.

And the joy of going to the field and working with a 12-year-old or coming and hanging out with you still keeps me going.

And I'll be driving home tonight.

My adrenaline will carry me because I had a really good time doing this.

And you brought memories back that haven't come to the surface for a long time.

So thank you for that.

No, Tom, the ability that you have to explain complicated things, recall ancient things,

and then look into the future

is a rare thing.

And I think the future is really good.

And, you know, you love baseball, so do I.

It's just now figuring out what it it needs to do.

Baseball is going to get better, and it's trying to change.

The greatest right we have in this world is to change what's the hardest thing for us to do.

Change.

So, at the end of every episode, Pablo Torrey finds out a show about finding stuff out.

Tom House, what did you find out today?

I found out that there's not enough of you out there.

Everybody's looking for the immediate laugh, buzz, whatever.

There's stuff that's way deeper that does really influence kids.

Everybody thinks that if you talk about being autonomy, that you can be, not everybody can be autonomy, but you can be the best you that you can be.

And that's what we lack in this country.

Everybody's about outcome.

They're not about process.

And that is killing us.

Dr.

Tom House,

you know how to coach someone up.

Even podcasters.

Thank you.

So

let's try to do this again.

Find a topic that nobody else would touch.

Yeah.

And we'll do it again.

You're our guy now.

Yeah.

And I'll tell the truth.

What are they going to do?

What are they going to do to me?

That's the attitude you have to have.

Oh, what a goddamn delight.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next