Red Sox Elated To Get Hands On Tanner Houck

Red Sox area scout Todd Gold figured he was just doing his due diligence when he scouted Missouri this season.

Given the well-documented track record of righthander Tanner Houck, both in the Southeastern Conference and with Team USA, Gold couldn’t have imagined that he’d be a consideration for the Red Sox with the 24th overall pick.

“I didn’t think he was going to get anywhere near 24, to be honest with you,” Gold said.

Yet a slow start to the year in which Houck’s arm strength didn’t match his past college performance helped to open a door. By the conclusion of a junior campaign in which Houck went 4-7, 3.33, with 9.0 strikeouts and 2.3 walks per nine innings, he once again looked like one of the top college arms in his class.

The Red Sox were thus elated to take the 6-foot-5 righthander in the first round. He sits 92-93 mph and tops out at 97 with a two-seamer that, from his low three-quarters arm slot, features excellent sink and arm-side run.

“(His arm slot is) lower than a Kevin Brown, but that’s kind of the fastball I think of a lot whenever I see Tanner slinging it and coming in there at you,” Missouri coach Steve Bieser said. “There’s been days where you can just watch him, and it’s almost hard to call any other pitch because his fastball is so good.”

The action of that pitch and Houck’s ability to throw it for strikes gives him a solid floor as a reliever, but the steady improvements Gold believes he made with his slider over his junior year convinced Boston that he could have a future as a starter—the role in which the team plans to develop him.

“The scouts on our staff have tremendous conviction that he’s going to end up as a starter,” scouting director Mike Rikard said. “He’s the rare successful college (pitcher) where there’s still some good room for growth.”