Faces on the Field: J.R. House
To be honest, you could pitch an entire night's lineup of TV shows based strictly on the twists, turns and travels of House's athletic career:
8 p.m.: HIGH SCHOOL HOP (Comedy). J.R. House spends his high school career switching back and forth between high schools in West Virginia and Florida so he can pursue both of his loves, football and baseball, in respective hotbeds for the sports. Hijinks ensue.
9 p.m.: HOUSE (Medical drama). Promising baseball star J.R. House undergoes a different operation every week as he battles injuries and adversity on his climb to the Major Leagues. (Due to the graphic nature of some surgeries, viewer discretion advised).
10 p.m.: THE 25-YEAR-OLD FRESHMAN (Comedy/Drama). His baseball career stalled by a series of injuries and operations, J.R. House heads back to West Virginia University to pursue college football while recovering from his most recent surgery.
11 p.m. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (Reality). After more than a year away from the game, catcher J.R. House returns to organized baseball with the Houston Astros. In the opening episode, House homers in his first game back and opens the season with a franchise-record 18-game hitting streak at Double-A Corpus Christi.
The only show House cares about right now, though, is The Show.
Sidelined since the end of 2004, when he finished up the season with the Pittsburgh Pirates, House returned to the baseball field this year after signing a Minor League free agent deal with the Astros this past January.
With the Astros well set at catcher at Triple-A Round Rock, he was sent to Corpus Christi to catch and play first base for the Hooks.
Through May 4, House was hitting .339 with three home runs and 17 RBIs as well as nine doubles. He had helped lead Corpus Christi to a 16-11 record in the early going, which was good for a share of the lead in the league's South Division.
But to truly appreciate the J.R. House mini-series, you need to go a little further back.
In high school, House turned double duty between Nitro High School in Charleston, W.Va., and Seabreeze High in Ormond Beach, Fla., due in part to the fact that his family owned businesses in both states which not only necessitated them to maintain both households (no pun intended) but also allowed their two-sport star to compete with the best in both fields.
As the star quarterback at Nitro, he held several records in football, including the national high school mark for career yards passing (14,457) that stood until 2002. He also threw 10 touchdown passes in one playoff game, also a national record.
But when baseball draft time came in 1999, he fell to the fifth round due in part to questions about his signability. He'd signed a letter of intent to play football for Coach Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia University, which scared off some clubs.
However, the Pirates took him in the fifth round and within a few weeks he was in Bradenton, Fla., making his professional baseball debut behind the plate for the Gulf Coast League Pirates. He hit over .300 that summer between Bradenton, short-season Williamsport (Pa.) and a quick stop at Hickory of the South Atlantic League.
In 2000, House looked like a steal. Despite missing a month midseason due to mononucleosis, he led the league with a .348 average and 23 homers, finishing eight RBIs short of the Triple Crown with 90.
The next year he skipped past Advanced A, right to Double-A Altoona. And that's when the injuries started to mount and his star began to fade.
Two stints on the DL in '01, both due to a strained rib cage muscle. Two more at Altoona in 2002, once to operate on the rib cage muscle and once to repair an abdominal hernia. That September he underwent Tommy John surgery on his throwing arm and missed most of 2003, as well, ending up at Altoona yet again down the stretch.
That fall, however, he made his very brief Major League debut, singling off of Cubs starter Matt Clement as a pinch hitter Sept. 27 in his lone at-bat. In 2004 he finally made it to Triple-A Nashville, but a sprained knee cost him time at midseason as he hit .288 with 15 home runs and 49 RBIs in 92 games. He became just the second player to hit for the cycle in team history and set a franchise record with three grand slams.
Those footnotes in Sounds history wouldn't be enough to keep him with the Pirates, though. He underwent the knife again, this time on his shoulder in February, and was released a few days later.
House called the release "unfortunate" but if it wasn't exactly a door closing and another one opening, it at least gave him a chance to sneak in a brief window of opportunity he'd always dreamed of: to play football for West Virginia.
"I'd kept in touch with Coach Rodriguez, and he always told me if I wanted to come back I'd have a place there and it was true," House said. "So I went there and was able to work out and get my arm strong again."
House served as the backup quarterback on a Mountaineers team that won the Big East and a spot in the Sugar Bowl, seeing late action in two games. It wasn't exactly what he'd dreamed of as a kid, but it was still, he said, "a blast."
"Being a West Virginia kid, that was the only place I ever wanted to play and the only coach I ever wanted to play for," said House, who didn't travel with his team to the Sugar Bowl, opting instead to stay home and work out in anticipation of signing with the Astros later that month.
"But being a 25-year-old freshman, I'm kind of over that whole party scene. So I enjoyed it, but I didn't get too crazy."
House had hoped his arm would rebound more quickly than it did, but in fact he wasn't at what he considered full quarterback strength until the sixth game of the season. By that point, he pretty much knew that he'd return to baseball.
"Everyone there understood that if it didn't work out and I wasn't the starting quarterback, I could go back to baseball and there would be no hard feelings," he said.
House came to the Astros' attention through Tom Wiedenbauer, the club's Minor League field coordinator, who lived in the same Florida neighborhood where the House family spent their baseball seasons.
"He always stood out quite a bit from a talent standpoint," recalled Wiedenbauer, whose daughter was a classmate of House's at Seabreeze.
Once Wiedenbauer knew that House was ready to return, he called Astros' farm director Ricky Bennett and pitched the idea of signing him as a Minor League free agent.
"His arm strength was coming back, and he was the kind of guy we like to have in the organization," Wiedenbauer said. "A hard worker, a great kid who would represent himself on and off the field in a professional way."
And so it came about that House landed with the Corpus Christi Hooks. He knows that the Astros are high on both catchers, Hector Gimenez and Humberto Quintero, that they have at Round Rock but that doesn't deter him, or make him want to move to first base full-time if that hastened his return to the Majors.
"I love to catch," he said. "It would totally change my passion for the game if I could only play first base. I love the responsibility, I love working with the pitchers, I love learning how to get guys out. It's in my blood, I guess."
And every day, as his bat remains hot, his arm warms up more and more.
"You can see the progress almost daily," Wiedenbauer said. "But the big key is he feels good, he doesn't feel pain."
And once he's healthy, if that bat stays hot, what do the Astros do with all those catchers?
"It's a nice problem to have," said Wiedenbauer. "But if he can catch and throw to go along with that bat, he'll force us to make that decision."
Even if discerning television programming executives start knocking down his door, J.R. House probably won't care, at least not for now. All that concerns him now is continuing his so-far successful return to baseball. And he's off to a good start.
Lisa Winston is a reporter for MLB.com.