A handful of years ago, Tom House worked with La Jolla Vikings baseball players and other local athletes on improving their pitching and quarterback throwing techniques. A sportswriter for this news portal was invited to observe House, a former Major League pitcher who studied biomechanics, and ask him questions as he interacted with the high school athletes.
To bring you up to date, House and his collaborators have put out a new app, Mustard, which will allow youthful throwers to make a video of their throwing motion and use input available in the app to make improvements. Their intent is to give athletes who otherwise wouldn’t have access to coaching and a personal trainer a chance to grow.
House, who has worked with star quarterbacks Tom Brady and Drew Brees, and pitching standouts Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan, among other NFL and MLB players, noticed that young athletes often quit competing for their school team or youth organization about middle school age. One of the factors, apparently, is frustration over the fact they can’t get needed coaching, and as a result, they stop progressing.
“Giving out elite instruction to 12-year-olds not only helps them play better but with more fun,” said House. “It keeps them in the sport.”
So, from a video shot by parents of their son on their smartphone, Mustard will give feedback on his throwing motion using 11 variables House rates as most important, including timing, kinematic sequencing, balance, posture, stride momentum, and release point.
The app runs a regression analysis based on House’s 40-year motion capture database. It takes into consideration the athlete’s age and size, and then provide corrective exercises.
House linked up with Jason Goldsmith, a mental performance coach. One time, he cracked to Goldsmith, “You know, there are probably 10,000 Nolan Ryan’s in the world that will never play baseball.” House was referring to the fact that many youths just don’t have access to proper coaching.
The former pitching coach, now 77, formed a team with engineers Carlos Dietrich and Kevin Prince, who both previously worked at Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). House credits Dietrich’s ability to extract biomechanical data from a phone using computer vision. This was the same kind of thing House did years ago when he began videotaping pitchers and analyzing their motions.
A real zinger from the throwing guru goes like this: “The simpler (the Mustard app is), the easier it is to disseminate throughout sports, which are games of failure coached by negative people in a misinformation environment.”
House has always enjoyed tweaking people’s “accepted truths,” those things that adults believe and pass on to youth in their coaching, and that others — traditionalists — simply practice without submitting it to analysis.
Many of the training methods that are now considered “normal” were once viewed as odd and inappropriate. House brought many practices into the acceptable zone. One considered offbeat was a baseball pitcher practicing throwing a football. Then, when Nolan Ryan was seen throwing one, people didn’t fight it as much.
