He Studies Why Baseball Players Suffer Upon Exiting Never-Never Land

Dodger great Roy Campanella once said there had to be “a lot of little boy in you” to succeed in the major leagues. Tom House made a similar observation but carried the thought one step further. A professional baseball player, House has written, “is for all practical purposes terminally adolescent.”

Campanella’s combination of ability and attitude was such that he was elected to the Hall of Fame. House’s spirit was willing but his flesh was considerably weaker. His lone contribution to the baseball shrine at Cooperstown was as an adjunct to Henry Aaron.

House caught the ball that Aaron hit to surpass Babe Ruth’s career home run record and appeared in a famous photograph gleefully handing the ball to Aaron at home plate in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

“That’s the statement of my (playing) career,” he said Monday night, smiling at the memory 15 years later. A left-handed pitcher, House spent six full seasons in the majors. Later this month he will mark his fourth anniversary as pitching coach of the Texas Rangers.

What really sets House apart from former players and current pitching coaches, other than an inquisitive mind that has antagonized traditionalists, is a title.

Dwight Gooden still carries his childhood nickname of Doc. Casey Stengel used to address everyone as doctor because it excused him from memorizing the first names of the thousands he met. But House comes to the designation of doctor honestly. He holds a doctorate in psychology.

House didn’t have to venture far to find a topic for his doctoral thesis. “When I was released as a player,” he said before Monday night’s game between the Rangers and New York Yankees, “I looked around at my peer group. The divorce rate was above average, there were bankruptcies and substance abuse of all kinds. Even with people who were financially secure, there was an unhappiness with the quality of their lives.”

One former teammate he chose not to identify called him in desperation. The man said he was holding a gun to his head. House talked him into counseling and he has since straightened out his life.

But the inability to cope with demands of the real world, with “civilian” status, led House to study terminal adolescent syndrome among professional athletes.

House knew whereof he spoke. “I was losing a marriage,” he said, “I did go bankrupt and my children made no sense to me. When I was released (as a player), my parents didn’t even talk to me for a year and a half.” Their status in the community, it developed, was founded on House’s athletic success.

Now House has taken his personal situation and observations, tested them against the experiences of contemporaries and set the results to public scrutiny in a volume entitled, “The Jock’s Itch.”

Published by Contemporary Books, it is a successor to the enormously successful “Ball Four” that stops short of naming names. Instead, House chooses to concentrate on the behavior patterns of professional athletes and the way in which the demands and rewards of their sport inhibit their mental and emotional growth.

“Athletes are Nintendo,” he said. “Real world people are human computers.” Because of the special deference paid to extraordinary athletes dating to childhood, they are not programmed to deal with everyday problems that confront those whose skills do not inspire adoring crowds or million-dollar contracts.

Baseball is an extended family with its own culture, its own rules of deportment that have little to do with the rest of society. House likened it to the card game played by the closed family in “The Accidental Tourist,” unintelligible to outsiders but comforting and bonding to the members.

He identified strongly with Jim Bouton’s conclusion to “Ball Four:” “You see,” Bouton wrote, “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

To this day, House remains in baseball’s grip.

“It’s got you for life,” he said. “It got me.” Fortunately, he was able to stay with it after his playing days, although it took great sacrifices on the part of his wife and three children and the willingness of his superiors, notably Ranger Manager Bobby Valentine and General Manager Tom Grieve, to take a fresh approach to the game.

The book is small, much like the man was in the world he chose. House is 5 feet 9, 165 pounds. His energy always has exceeded his strength. When he faced reporters after the catch of Aaron’s homer in the Braves’ bullpen on that April night in 1974, he identified himself in the terms of his teammates. “(They) call me the ‘Human Greenie,’ ” he said then.

He realized early in his career he would not be the next Sandy Koufax. In his own words, House worked to become “the best 81 m.p.h. left-handed fastball pitcher in baseball.” With no small measure of pride, he said it was his opinion that only Randy Jones did better with similar talent.

A graduate of USC, House was relentlessly hyper and curious. When a manager or coach gave an order, he asked, Why? He’s still asking. “The Jock’s Itch,” he said, is a serious attempt not only to deal with the problems but also to find solutions. It’s a search of self-identification.

House certainly hasn’t discovered a cure. Sitting on a stool in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, he said he’s still wondering “why I am not comfortable outside this environment.” He remains happiest “working with pitchers on the mound, throwing batting practice, staying with a game called baseball.”

It’s a relationship Dr. House hopes he never has to sever even as he continues to study why parting is so difficult for so many.