Tom House, baseball lifer, reborn as guru to Brady, Brees By David Steele @david_c_steele RSS July 5, 2014 1:07pm EDT 
Tom House (AP Photo) Going from coaching Nolan Ryan to coaching Tom Brady is not a natural progression—even if pitching-guru-turned-quarterback guru Tom House swears that throwing a baseball and a football are essentially the same.Still, House said this week from his southern California home, “You like to say you’re lucky, and you like to say you’re good—and in reality, you’re a little bit of both.’’House’s luck was being a neighbor of Drew Brees’ in San Diego, when House was the Padres’ pitching coach and Brees was quarterback for the Chargers. Brees famously injured his throwing shoulder at the end of the 2005 season, and House was asked to help with his rehab.“It ended up being kind of an epiphany,’’ House said.That epiphany gave birth to his current side gig: In the final weeks before NFL training camps open later this month, and in between running the Rod Dedeaux Research and Baseball Institute and the National Pitching Association, House fine-tunes the mechanics of a stable of starting, and hope-to-be-starting, NFL quarterbacks.It adds an unexpected chapter to his unique legacy. Before becoming what he calls a “throwing specialist,” he was the Braves’ reliever who caught Hank Aaron’s 715th home run in 1974. “I was blessed to be part of that wonderful event,” said House, now 67. “It’s been an ongoing warm-and-fuzzy for me ever since.”Also, this past spring, House’s role in transforming two teenage baseball novices from India into real pitchers was immortalized on film in Disney’s “Million Dollar Arm.” House was played by Bill Paxton.Expanding into a totally different sport is enough of a leap. Growing beyond one student was, House said, “all word-of-mouth.” Word spread from Brees to Brady and, eventually, to Carson Palmer, Alex Smith, Matt Barkley and Terrelle Pryor, to “12 or 13” current quarterbacks, by House’s count.Many of them will make the trip to House to work during their last window of offseason free time.“This is a time for tune-ups,’’ House said. “They’ve done all the effort stuff, the repetition stuff (in minicamps), and now they come in for tune-ups before their mandatory camps.”House pitched for eight years in the majors, coached for 25 in the big leagues, Japan and at his alma mater of USC, and has a Ph.D. in sports psychology. Yet it didn’t sink in for a long time that quarterbacks could be taught the same way pitchers are.Even when he had gained a quirky reputation in baseball for having his pitchers—including Ryan—toss a football around in workouts, the notion of working with football players didn’t take hold. One of his oldest pitching lessons was that you can’t throw a football wrong and make it spiral. The idea, House said, had come from studying, yes, quarterbacks on film.“We had movies of Marino, Beuerlein, Marinovich, other quarterbacks, breaking them down at 1,000 feet per second,’’ he said. “We had all this information, and we didn’t know how to use it yet.’’Not until the light bulb went on while he was helping Brees re-learn how to throw. “In our rehab,’’ House said, “we saw that the mechanics of throwing a football and the mechanics of throwing a baseball were the same. The conditioning was the same.“You don’t know what you don’t know,’’ he added.At least two Super Bowl winners, and a swarm of others who hope to win one, know now.link
