Pablo Torre Finds Out - House Call: Why the World's Best Pitchers and Quarterbacks Seek This Man's Advice

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

He got the Sandy Koufax seal of approval, then re-trained Nolan Ryan in his forties. He upgraded Drew Brees into one of the most accurate passers of all time, then went tête-à-tête with Tom Brady. He even tried turning Michael Jordan and Tim Tebow into baseball players. But for legendary pitching coach Dr. Tom House, the science of throwing is all in the mind, from performance anxiety to the human nerve bank. And now, at 77, he's looking into a future without Shohei Ohtani on the mound — and a 118-mile-an-hour fastball coming for your head. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by Draft Kings. Draft Kings, the crown is yours. 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. Right after this ad.

We're listening to Draft Kings Network. 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 8, 1974. I think it was about 8.06 p.m.

We'll see what Downing does. Alice the belt delivers, and he's lobe all one. And that just adds to the pressure. The crowd booing. A fastball from Al Downing to Henry Aaron. Fythe goes back to the Fann City score. Yet 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. 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 was 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 does 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 dove 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 and 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's 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. Shooters 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 Breeze, to Nolan Ryan, to Andrew Luck, to Randy Johnson, to Tim Tebow, 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.

That's the Tom House stuff. Here, I'll show you, Pey. It's about creating torque. You're good. Right? It's about creating, you close the left hip, open up that right hip. Close the left shoulder, open up the hip. When I touched base with Tom recently, while I was out in L.A.,

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 Peyton 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 Kofax.

I'm sure you might recognize that name. Familiar with the name. I brought it up the other day, and the kids didn't 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 Kofax 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 curbstall. Let me tell you about curballs. There are good curball hitters, but nobody hits a good curbar ball. You keep throwing that pitch I'll see in the big leagues in four years. He was right.

That's like having Michelangela come by and say, by the way, you're pretty good with this paintbrush. And you know what that did for me? I put 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 Shamblis. 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 to right field. Back is Evans and a ball game. And before Zim's family hit the bench, it was upper deck game over. Walk off. 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, Mandra 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 worst 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 PhD in sports psychology after you retire from baseball.

Your career is 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 or my dad could understand. how anybody can make a living playing a 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 until I was 44. 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 were they were on a

limited budget with a franchise that was barely hanging on The Texas Rangers 3 to 2 on a little if he play, jamming with a fastball. Tom Greve 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 mortgage 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 ying yank. 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 two men left on base, and the final score, the Texas Rangers 7 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. Yep.

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? 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 first. 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 him, they worked. I was very fortunate to have pictures. 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 mean. And he literally said I was a better pitcher from age 39 to 46 than I was any time during the previous 39 years.

So the guy who was at home plate with those glasses wears these goggles in this role, but now you're Professor Gadget. Yeah. That's what they called you. Yeah. 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. Listen to somebody like me, talk about proprio neural facilitation. Can you see him? What's he talking about? It's a baseball. Throw it. About drag crisis from moving 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. I thought it was going to be a mental-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 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 in someone trying to make it. So even though it was weird, they were coming by to see it was going on. And then the quarterback that picked up for Tom Brady the year here it is, our 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 quarterbacks in a picture. 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 did you see? I felt this.

What should I have felt? 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, I just say closed until 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. 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 Breeze's 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 had 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 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? What 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. Right. 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 bag. Why are they afraid of the baseball?

I don't know. Because it hurts. 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 cap, but we were the original research on velocity. With a 2-pound, 1-pound, 6, 5, 4, and 2-ounce ball, we both threw and held on to. We sold that from tennis. Tennis players never have bad shoulders on the backside

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 lengths, velocities went off the chart. A hundred and four from a rollous Chapman. Strike three,

Coach, strike three. 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 Milanization 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-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 miles, 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, 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 that'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 achieved, 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 out you can laugh at it 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. Aroldus Chapman? A rollus 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 thrown 118 today. but steroids everybody beats up and right for 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 pitchman for steroids. Yeah. The thing that amazes me is a hitter should not be able to catch up with 105-mile-old. 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.

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

Yes. Times 10. That hitter-pitcher relationship, that dance is going to be, that's what makes baseball to me as 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. But the genius of Greg Maddox, 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. And he was a genius at all those.

And a fastball in at 90 is faster than a fastball away at 90. Perceive velocity. One foot of distance, three miles an hour. So what he was was a guy that had a release point closer to home play than any other six-foot pitcher. 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. This ball obviously just getting away from him, but what's the reaction of John Cruck? 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 slatters 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 is 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 coach Jamie Moyer. What goes around comes around. Right now every staff in the big leagues is looking for a pitcher like Jamie Moore. Jamie Moore was me only really good at being me.

Right. He's just running 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 can be productive. You can count him. He's never going to be on the deal. What's the biggest problem right now with baseball? Half the pitching staffs...

Injuries. Yeah, there's no durability. So right now, in the spring training 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 any time he want to look at it.

So the innings-eater... The innings-eater is suddenly even more value. You've got to save your studs, and you can't have 12 studs on a staff. You've got to have someone that can eat it so that the stud can perform. Right. That's where it's going. 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 T's. Kim 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 for Milan, 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 to turn him loose on a three and no count. They do and he popped it up on the interior. 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-arm, man, in, can't hit. If he would have played baseball from this start, he probably could have made a really good big leger.

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, look at the raveens down the field, and it's caught by Tix.

But again, being on a mound where the basis is 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 It's six in a row to start the day. Paul Skeen. 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 just speed round now. Do you think Showy Otani should keep pitching? No. No.

I think he's a hitter. He's proved all he needs to throw, all he needs to do as a pitcher. Miguel Vargas. Swang in a miss, Shoahe Otani. A spectacular one with his 11th strikeout of the night. 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 the 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 in 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, did you watch him and self-evidently unprecedented? Right. But you're saying for his own long-term interest. Yes. 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 loved 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 that 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 practice range, he said, Tom, I think he had Parkinson's. I said, all right, how do I find out? He said, call it this guy. So I got tested and I did. They figured 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. 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 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 stumble into it. And the doctor that I was working with at the time said,

you know, it doesn't kill you, but 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 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'm at my mind. Encaphalines and endorphins are basically brothers and sisters of dopamine. It's an eam. It's an uppers, a feel-good thing.

And they've taken my skin cells. My skin cells are becoming the stem cells that they can eject at the base of my brain to make sure that dopamine production starts to get. I'm 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've punched 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. It'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. I'll be driving home tonight. My adrenaline will carry me because I had a really good time doing this.

And you've 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 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 of Pablo Torre finds out a show about finding stuff out, Tom House.

What did you find out today? I find 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 Otani, 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 um you know how to coach someone up even podcasters thank you so let's not let's try to do this again find a topic

that nobody else would touch yeah and we'll do it again you're you're our guy now yeah and i'll tell the truth what are they going to do what they're going to do to me that's the attitude you have to what a goddamn delight this has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production and I'll talk to you next time.