Head Coach - Joey Gomes
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Assistant Coach - David Simmons
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Prune Packers tap Joey Gomes as new Manager/GM
Greg Clementi
Healdsburg Tribune
November 13, 2013
Timing is everything, whether competing on a baseball diamond or pulling strings in the front office.
So it seemed last week when Prune Packers President Riley Sullivan announced the hiring of former professional player and veteran coach Joey Gomes as the team’s new Manager/General Manager for the upcoming 2014 campaign.
The announcement couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, coming the day after Gomes’ younger brother Jonny helped power the Boston Red Sox to a World Series win over the St. Louis Cardinals in six games.
Gomes, who will also serve as the Director of Baseball Development, takes the reins from former Prune Packer’s Manager Damon McGovran who piloted the team to a solid 31-25 record in his second season at the helm.
“Obviously Joey has baseball experience as a former pro player, which is great for our program,” Sullivan said. “He’s really good at training young players and cultivating talent. He brings a lot of pizzazz to the team so it’s really exciting to have him on board.”
The Prune Packers, an organization steeped in local baseball tradition, has established solid footing in the first two seasons since its revival. With all home games played at the newly renovated Recreation Park, the team has energized a new generation of fans that have found the Packers to be a great (and more affordable) alternative to Major League games.
“The baseball will take care of itself, but I want the community to embrace the team and be passionate about our program,” said Gomes, a former high school and college All-American at Casa Grande and Santa Clara University before playing pro ball in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “It doesn’t matter what level you’re competing at, we’ll be playing to win a championship.”
The team has utilized a roster of current and former college stars for the past two seasons, but hopes to dramatically increase the talent level in the years to come.
“I’ve already been in touch with college programs such as the University of Oregon and Santa Clara,” Gomes noted. “They’re ready to send me players but it will take a summer or two to get things established. We’ll be a Division-1 level program within two years,” he predicted.
The Prune Packers have upgraded their schedule for next year, leaving the Sacramento Rural League for the more competitive and prestigious Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. The team will kick off its 2014 campaign in May.
Baseball Continues To Bond Gomes Brothers
Tim Britton
Providence Journal
June 19, 2014
Healdsburg, CA
It’s shortly after 5 p.m. on a sweaty Wednesday in northern California, and Joey Gomes — older brother to Jonny — is out helping prep the field at Recreation Park alongside his players.
Gomes is the general manager and head coach of the Healdsburg Prune Packers of the Golden State Collegiate Baseball League, a kind of upstart California version of the Cape League in its third year of existence. About 100 spectators, many of them kids who walk to the park in this portion of wine country, were there Wednesday to see his team drop a 5-2 decision to the Sonoma County Chili Gods.
Gomes is here because, three years after hanging up his spikes from independent ball, he can’t leave the game of baseball. He is Jonny Gomes’ brother after all.
You may question the Gomes’ baseball philosophy and its emphasis on the clubhouse. You may question Jonny’s pitch selection, or how much he should play against right-handers, or his routes to balls in left field.
You can never question the passion he and his brother have always shown toward the game of baseball — the game that bonded them during their tumultuous childhood, the game upon which they’ve left their imprint in northern California.
“Baseball was the glue,” Joey Gomes said of his relationship with his brother. The travails of their teenage years have been well-documented. There was a car crash that killed Jonny’s best friend. There were nights spent without a home. There were mistakes made by both brothers.
There was always baseball.
Those trials, Joey Gomes said, only served as “motivation to change this chain of events in our life.”
“Baseball was an outlet for that,” he continued. “Quite literally, when we would get on a baseball field, my brother and I viewed it as, there’s no more socioeconomic advantage in life. The minute you cross that [line], you’ve got to deal with me. I don’t have to deal with the school you go to or the clothes you’re wearing.”
Joey was always the model for Jonny. A year older, Joey went through the experiences of life and baseball a touch before his younger brother, and he was always there as a support system.
“He totally paved the way for me for everything this game has brought me, and everything that I didn’t know this game could bring me,” Jonny Gomes said. “He played on all the summer leagues, he traveled a long way. He was the first one in the whole family to get a college scholarship and to go to college.”
“I didn’t think I was paving any ways,” said Joey Gomes. “The home runs that he would hit, that’s all him. If there was anything you would want to pin on me, he probably just saw the way I played and said, ‘Well, I should probably run hard like that. I should probably show up every day like that.’ But he did it; he did it to the nth degree.”
The way both Gomes brothers play the game has never been negotiable.
“At a young age, we honestly thought, ‘How could you not play that hard?’” Joey Gomes said. “It was better than math. It was better than anything. ... There were a few times in Little League that we had the game taken away from us because of events out of our control. So you created this ideology inside of a grade schooler’s head that you don’t know when your last game is going to be. So you just left it all out there.”
Remarkably, the fierce intensity and the relentlessness that defines their style of play didn’t leak over into their own relationship. The two were both stars growing up in Petaluma, but their competitiveness was always focused on an external opponent, and never each other.
Joey mentions the batting cage located in a barn that the two hit at in high school, the one where they each tried their hardest to knock down the wall with line drives.
“This would probably be a good metaphor for how the relationship was,” Joey Gomes said. “It wasn’t me versus him; it was who could knock the wall down. We were competing against the wall. And the wall came down.”
Who struck the final blow against the wall? Joey doesn’t remember; the wall’s ultimate demise was from attrition, from day after day of absorbing Gomes family line drives.
“It was probably the healthiest competition you could have,” said Jonny Gomes. “He was really pulling for me, and I was really pulling for him. It wasn’t who could hit the ball farther or who can get on more.”
“We solely used each other as motivation to get better,” Joey Gomes said. “It’s not tough to believe; it’s literally what happened. Otherwise, we would have killed each other.”
The two got to play briefly together in the Tampa Bay organization, for Bakersfield of the California League, in 2002. It only lasted a few weeks, but Joey Gomes remembers hearing them introduced back-to-back in the batting order, and “you kind of look at him and it’s like, that’s so cool.”
Their careers have taken them different places, but they share the requited pride of being from Petaluma. Jonny is a favorite son, the only man from Casa Grande High School to reach the major leagues. Joey is the coach come home, who helps tutor players from Little League to college in the fine arts of baseball.
“What he’s doing now, it’s truly his calling,” Jonny Gomes said. “He’ll talk to me on the phone for like an hour about a 6-year-old’s swing. He’s losing sleep trying to get this kid better. His coaching is second to none.”
“Anything that’s worth your time in life should also be worth your effort, or why are you doing it?” said Joey Gomes. “It’s not about what I know; it’s how much I care. That’s the magic.”
The two still talk baseball — “he’s probably my best resource that I have,” Jonny Gomes said — with a focus perhaps not surprisingly on the mental side of things more than the mechanical. The expectation is they’ll get to spend some time together this weekend, though on Wednesday night at least, Joey wasn’t sure of that. So he grabs a reporter’s recorder and lets it be known.
“I’m waiting for you to still call me, you [expletive]. I don’t want to make it ‘Bring Your Brother to Work Day.’ Give me the invite.”
Spoken like an older brother.
His brother is a Major Leaguer who just signed a reported $1 million contract, but Joey Gomes considers himself "the luckiest man in California.
"For the rest of my life I'm going to be happy," he explains. The reason for his optimism can be summed up in one word — "baseball."
Gomes, now 32, isn't through playing yet. After batting .367 and winning the award for "Hitter of the Year" for Tiburones (Sharks) de Puerto Penasco in the Liga del Norte in Mexico and finishing off the year by helping the Grand Prairie Airhogs (Texas) win the American Association championship, he is ready for more.
Meanwhile, he is positioning to keep baseball in his life as a business career. In September, he became co-owner of the Redwood Baseball Institute (RBI), a batting cages and baseball teaching academy in Santa Rosa. One of the best aspects of the business for Gomes, like his brother, Jonny, a Casa Grande High graduate, is offering individual batting lessons for players of all ages. He has worked with batters as young as 5 years old and as old as 57.
"It's exciting helping develop the talent we have right here in Sonoma County," he says. "It is fun watching them go through the process of getting better at the game. It is not like work. I love talking and teaching baseball. This is what I want to do."
Among the local high school players he is currently working with are Danny Comstock and Dylan Parks from Petaluma High and Francis Christy from Casa Grande.
They all have tremendous respect for Gomes, not so much because he has been in baseball for 10 years, but because he is showing them how to hit their way to success in the game they all love.
"I've been working with him since I was 9 or 10 years old," says Parks. "He has done a ton to help me. He really gets into the whole philosophy of hitting. He took me from being mediocre and made me a pretty decent hitter."
Parks says what makes Gomes such a good teacher is the way he communicates to the younger hitters. He speaks their language.
"He is someone the kids can relate to," the high school player says. "He has more baseball knowledge than most guys who come out of Petaluma and he hits the ball harder than anyone I've ever seen."
"He started with the basics and taught me how to hit," Christy says. Like Parks, Christy says working with Gomes is more than just learning hitting. "Basically he is like a friend," the player explains. "He knows all the ups and downs. He's done it all and he did it at Casa Grande."
Gomes says much of being a successful baseball player are the same things that make you a success in life.
"A lot of people told me and Jonny what we couldn't do, but we were more concerned with what we needed to do to make it and get better," he explains.
Baseball has been good to both Jonny and Joey. The brothers had some tough times growing up during difficult financial times in Petaluma, but both survived through their determination and skill in a game that became a way of life.
Baseball has taken Jonny to the major leagues and a reported $1 million contract with the Oakland A's. It has given Joey a chance at a college education, travel all over Mexico and the United States and into a position where he now has a promising business career.
"I love the game," Joey Gomes says. "I love the competition and he camaraderie. I still want to play, but now I'm in a position where I'll be able to retire and not be forced out of the game. RBI does that for me. Everything in baseball is timing and it is the same in life and business. The opportunity to be involved with RBI came exactly at the right time for me.
"This is something I've always wanted to do. I've spent my whole life learning baseball, and now I'm passing what I learned on to others.
"The business side is coming along. This is just the beginning. I've already met people who want to help expand to outside fields and I've got a video lined up. This is perfect for me."
Not that Gomes is ready to give up the nomadic existence of baseball life, not after the fun and success he had playing in Mexico last season. It was his third try at Mexican baseball, but his first in a summer league.
"Their fans down there are passionate," he says. "The teams have cheerleaders and their fans love firecrackers. I don't mean fireworks, but real firecrackers. Their mascots have free rein to go anywhere and say and do anything. It's wild.
"Only four foreign players of any nationality are allowed on each team, so there is a lot of pressure on the foreign players to produce. Fortunately, I had a good year."
Gomes' says baseball career has taken him into Canada and all over Mexico and the United States.
"I've met some terrific people, and they start talking about restaurants or ball parks in any town, chances are I've been there."
It isn't just the travels that have taught Gomes life lessons that he almost inadvertently passes along to the young people he coaches.
"Life makes sense to me because of baseball," he says. "You can do everything right at the plate and still not get a base hit. You can do everything wrong and still get a hit. In life bad things happen to good people. It is how you deal with it that counts. The No. 1 thing is to be positive. There is too much failure to worry about the negative."
Joey means, not just says, he has no jealousy about his brother's success when he, himself, was very close to the big time, even getting to a major league spring training camp after being drafted in the eighth round by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2002.
"We (the whole family) are so proud of what Jonny has been able to accomplish," Joey says.
"When we talk, we talk about how well we're doing no matter where we're at. You can't play any harder no matter where we're at.
"We play alike. You see me busting my rear to get to first base and you see Jonny busting his rear to get to first base. You see me going hard into second base to bust up a double play and you see Jonny going hard into second base to bust up a double play. You see me standing on the top step of the dugout rooting for my teammates, and you see Jonny on the top step of the dugout rooting for his teammates.
"It's the way we play the game."
Prune Packers tap Joey Gomes as new Manager/GM
Greg Clementi
Healdsburg Tribune
November 13, 2013
Timing is everything, whether competing on a baseball diamond or pulling strings in the front office.
So it seemed last week when Prune Packers President Riley Sullivan announced the hiring of former professional player and veteran coach Joey Gomes as the team’s new Manager/General Manager for the upcoming 2014 campaign.
The announcement couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, coming the day after Gomes’ younger brother Jonny helped power the Boston Red Sox to a World Series win over the St. Louis Cardinals in six games.
Gomes, who will also serve as the Director of Baseball Development, takes the reins from former Prune Packer’s Manager Damon McGovran who piloted the team to a solid 31-25 record in his second season at the helm.
“Obviously Joey has baseball experience as a former pro player, which is great for our program,” Sullivan said. “He’s really good at training young players and cultivating talent. He brings a lot of pizzazz to the team so it’s really exciting to have him on board.”
The Prune Packers, an organization steeped in local baseball tradition, has established solid footing in the first two seasons since its revival. With all home games played at the newly renovated Recreation Park, the team has energized a new generation of fans that have found the Packers to be a great (and more affordable) alternative to Major League games.
“The baseball will take care of itself, but I want the community to embrace the team and be passionate about our program,” said Gomes, a former high school and college All-American at Casa Grande and Santa Clara University before playing pro ball in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “It doesn’t matter what level you’re competing at, we’ll be playing to win a championship.”
The team has utilized a roster of current and former college stars for the past two seasons, but hopes to dramatically increase the talent level in the years to come.
“I’ve already been in touch with college programs such as the University of Oregon and Santa Clara,” Gomes noted. “They’re ready to send me players but it will take a summer or two to get things established. We’ll be a Division-1 level program within two years,” he predicted.
The Prune Packers have upgraded their schedule for next year, leaving the Sacramento Rural League for the more competitive and prestigious Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. The team will kick off its 2014 campaign in May.
Greg Clementi
Healdsburg Tribune
November 13, 2013
Timing is everything, whether competing on a baseball diamond or pulling strings in the front office.
So it seemed last week when Prune Packers President Riley Sullivan announced the hiring of former professional player and veteran coach Joey Gomes as the team’s new Manager/General Manager for the upcoming 2014 campaign.
The announcement couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, coming the day after Gomes’ younger brother Jonny helped power the Boston Red Sox to a World Series win over the St. Louis Cardinals in six games.
Gomes, who will also serve as the Director of Baseball Development, takes the reins from former Prune Packer’s Manager Damon McGovran who piloted the team to a solid 31-25 record in his second season at the helm.
“Obviously Joey has baseball experience as a former pro player, which is great for our program,” Sullivan said. “He’s really good at training young players and cultivating talent. He brings a lot of pizzazz to the team so it’s really exciting to have him on board.”
The Prune Packers, an organization steeped in local baseball tradition, has established solid footing in the first two seasons since its revival. With all home games played at the newly renovated Recreation Park, the team has energized a new generation of fans that have found the Packers to be a great (and more affordable) alternative to Major League games.
“The baseball will take care of itself, but I want the community to embrace the team and be passionate about our program,” said Gomes, a former high school and college All-American at Casa Grande and Santa Clara University before playing pro ball in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “It doesn’t matter what level you’re competing at, we’ll be playing to win a championship.”
The team has utilized a roster of current and former college stars for the past two seasons, but hopes to dramatically increase the talent level in the years to come.
“I’ve already been in touch with college programs such as the University of Oregon and Santa Clara,” Gomes noted. “They’re ready to send me players but it will take a summer or two to get things established. We’ll be a Division-1 level program within two years,” he predicted.
The Prune Packers have upgraded their schedule for next year, leaving the Sacramento Rural League for the more competitive and prestigious Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. The team will kick off its 2014 campaign in May.
Baseball Continues To Bond Gomes Brothers
Tim Britton
Providence Journal
June 19, 2014
Healdsburg, CA
It’s shortly after 5 p.m. on a sweaty Wednesday in northern California, and Joey Gomes — older brother to Jonny — is out helping prep the field at Recreation Park alongside his players.
Gomes is the general manager and head coach of the Healdsburg Prune Packers of the Golden State Collegiate Baseball League, a kind of upstart California version of the Cape League in its third year of existence. About 100 spectators, many of them kids who walk to the park in this portion of wine country, were there Wednesday to see his team drop a 5-2 decision to the Sonoma County Chili Gods.
Gomes is here because, three years after hanging up his spikes from independent ball, he can’t leave the game of baseball. He is Jonny Gomes’ brother after all.
You may question the Gomes’ baseball philosophy and its emphasis on the clubhouse. You may question Jonny’s pitch selection, or how much he should play against right-handers, or his routes to balls in left field.
You can never question the passion he and his brother have always shown toward the game of baseball — the game that bonded them during their tumultuous childhood, the game upon which they’ve left their imprint in northern California.
“Baseball was the glue,” Joey Gomes said of his relationship with his brother. The travails of their teenage years have been well-documented. There was a car crash that killed Jonny’s best friend. There were nights spent without a home. There were mistakes made by both brothers.
There was always baseball.
Those trials, Joey Gomes said, only served as “motivation to change this chain of events in our life.”
“Baseball was an outlet for that,” he continued. “Quite literally, when we would get on a baseball field, my brother and I viewed it as, there’s no more socioeconomic advantage in life. The minute you cross that [line], you’ve got to deal with me. I don’t have to deal with the school you go to or the clothes you’re wearing.”
Joey was always the model for Jonny. A year older, Joey went through the experiences of life and baseball a touch before his younger brother, and he was always there as a support system.
“He totally paved the way for me for everything this game has brought me, and everything that I didn’t know this game could bring me,” Jonny Gomes said. “He played on all the summer leagues, he traveled a long way. He was the first one in the whole family to get a college scholarship and to go to college.”
“I didn’t think I was paving any ways,” said Joey Gomes. “The home runs that he would hit, that’s all him. If there was anything you would want to pin on me, he probably just saw the way I played and said, ‘Well, I should probably run hard like that. I should probably show up every day like that.’ But he did it; he did it to the nth degree.”
The way both Gomes brothers play the game has never been negotiable.
“At a young age, we honestly thought, ‘How could you not play that hard?’” Joey Gomes said. “It was better than math. It was better than anything. ... There were a few times in Little League that we had the game taken away from us because of events out of our control. So you created this ideology inside of a grade schooler’s head that you don’t know when your last game is going to be. So you just left it all out there.”
Remarkably, the fierce intensity and the relentlessness that defines their style of play didn’t leak over into their own relationship. The two were both stars growing up in Petaluma, but their competitiveness was always focused on an external opponent, and never each other.
Joey mentions the batting cage located in a barn that the two hit at in high school, the one where they each tried their hardest to knock down the wall with line drives.
“This would probably be a good metaphor for how the relationship was,” Joey Gomes said. “It wasn’t me versus him; it was who could knock the wall down. We were competing against the wall. And the wall came down.”
Who struck the final blow against the wall? Joey doesn’t remember; the wall’s ultimate demise was from attrition, from day after day of absorbing Gomes family line drives.
“It was probably the healthiest competition you could have,” said Jonny Gomes. “He was really pulling for me, and I was really pulling for him. It wasn’t who could hit the ball farther or who can get on more.”
“We solely used each other as motivation to get better,” Joey Gomes said. “It’s not tough to believe; it’s literally what happened. Otherwise, we would have killed each other.”
The two got to play briefly together in the Tampa Bay organization, for Bakersfield of the California League, in 2002. It only lasted a few weeks, but Joey Gomes remembers hearing them introduced back-to-back in the batting order, and “you kind of look at him and it’s like, that’s so cool.”
Their careers have taken them different places, but they share the requited pride of being from Petaluma. Jonny is a favorite son, the only man from Casa Grande High School to reach the major leagues. Joey is the coach come home, who helps tutor players from Little League to college in the fine arts of baseball.
“What he’s doing now, it’s truly his calling,” Jonny Gomes said. “He’ll talk to me on the phone for like an hour about a 6-year-old’s swing. He’s losing sleep trying to get this kid better. His coaching is second to none.”
“Anything that’s worth your time in life should also be worth your effort, or why are you doing it?” said Joey Gomes. “It’s not about what I know; it’s how much I care. That’s the magic.”
The two still talk baseball — “he’s probably my best resource that I have,” Jonny Gomes said — with a focus perhaps not surprisingly on the mental side of things more than the mechanical. The expectation is they’ll get to spend some time together this weekend, though on Wednesday night at least, Joey wasn’t sure of that. So he grabs a reporter’s recorder and lets it be known.
“I’m waiting for you to still call me, you [expletive]. I don’t want to make it ‘Bring Your Brother to Work Day.’ Give me the invite.”
Spoken like an older brother.
His brother is a Major Leaguer who just signed a reported $1 million contract, but Joey Gomes considers himself "the luckiest man in California.
"For the rest of my life I'm going to be happy," he explains. The reason for his optimism can be summed up in one word — "baseball."
Gomes, now 32, isn't through playing yet. After batting .367 and winning the award for "Hitter of the Year" for Tiburones (Sharks) de Puerto Penasco in the Liga del Norte in Mexico and finishing off the year by helping the Grand Prairie Airhogs (Texas) win the American Association championship, he is ready for more.
Meanwhile, he is positioning to keep baseball in his life as a business career. In September, he became co-owner of the Redwood Baseball Institute (RBI), a batting cages and baseball teaching academy in Santa Rosa. One of the best aspects of the business for Gomes, like his brother, Jonny, a Casa Grande High graduate, is offering individual batting lessons for players of all ages. He has worked with batters as young as 5 years old and as old as 57.
"It's exciting helping develop the talent we have right here in Sonoma County," he says. "It is fun watching them go through the process of getting better at the game. It is not like work. I love talking and teaching baseball. This is what I want to do."
Among the local high school players he is currently working with are Danny Comstock and Dylan Parks from Petaluma High and Francis Christy from Casa Grande.
They all have tremendous respect for Gomes, not so much because he has been in baseball for 10 years, but because he is showing them how to hit their way to success in the game they all love.
"I've been working with him since I was 9 or 10 years old," says Parks. "He has done a ton to help me. He really gets into the whole philosophy of hitting. He took me from being mediocre and made me a pretty decent hitter."
Parks says what makes Gomes such a good teacher is the way he communicates to the younger hitters. He speaks their language.
"He is someone the kids can relate to," the high school player says. "He has more baseball knowledge than most guys who come out of Petaluma and he hits the ball harder than anyone I've ever seen."
"He started with the basics and taught me how to hit," Christy says. Like Parks, Christy says working with Gomes is more than just learning hitting. "Basically he is like a friend," the player explains. "He knows all the ups and downs. He's done it all and he did it at Casa Grande."
Gomes says much of being a successful baseball player are the same things that make you a success in life.
"A lot of people told me and Jonny what we couldn't do, but we were more concerned with what we needed to do to make it and get better," he explains.
Baseball has been good to both Jonny and Joey. The brothers had some tough times growing up during difficult financial times in Petaluma, but both survived through their determination and skill in a game that became a way of life.
Baseball has taken Jonny to the major leagues and a reported $1 million contract with the Oakland A's. It has given Joey a chance at a college education, travel all over Mexico and the United States and into a position where he now has a promising business career.
"I love the game," Joey Gomes says. "I love the competition and he camaraderie. I still want to play, but now I'm in a position where I'll be able to retire and not be forced out of the game. RBI does that for me. Everything in baseball is timing and it is the same in life and business. The opportunity to be involved with RBI came exactly at the right time for me.
"This is something I've always wanted to do. I've spent my whole life learning baseball, and now I'm passing what I learned on to others.
"The business side is coming along. This is just the beginning. I've already met people who want to help expand to outside fields and I've got a video lined up. This is perfect for me."
Not that Gomes is ready to give up the nomadic existence of baseball life, not after the fun and success he had playing in Mexico last season. It was his third try at Mexican baseball, but his first in a summer league.
"Their fans down there are passionate," he says. "The teams have cheerleaders and their fans love firecrackers. I don't mean fireworks, but real firecrackers. Their mascots have free rein to go anywhere and say and do anything. It's wild.
"Only four foreign players of any nationality are allowed on each team, so there is a lot of pressure on the foreign players to produce. Fortunately, I had a good year."
Gomes' says baseball career has taken him into Canada and all over Mexico and the United States.
"I've met some terrific people, and they start talking about restaurants or ball parks in any town, chances are I've been there."
It isn't just the travels that have taught Gomes life lessons that he almost inadvertently passes along to the young people he coaches.
"Life makes sense to me because of baseball," he says. "You can do everything right at the plate and still not get a base hit. You can do everything wrong and still get a hit. In life bad things happen to good people. It is how you deal with it that counts. The No. 1 thing is to be positive. There is too much failure to worry about the negative."
Joey means, not just says, he has no jealousy about his brother's success when he, himself, was very close to the big time, even getting to a major league spring training camp after being drafted in the eighth round by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2002.
"We (the whole family) are so proud of what Jonny has been able to accomplish," Joey says.
"When we talk, we talk about how well we're doing no matter where we're at. You can't play any harder no matter where we're at.
"We play alike. You see me busting my rear to get to first base and you see Jonny busting his rear to get to first base. You see me going hard into second base to bust up a double play and you see Jonny going hard into second base to bust up a double play. You see me standing on the top step of the dugout rooting for my teammates, and you see Jonny on the top step of the dugout rooting for his teammates.
"It's the way we play the game."
Prune Packers tap Joey Gomes as new Manager/GM
Greg Clementi
Healdsburg Tribune
November 13, 2013
Timing is everything, whether competing on a baseball diamond or pulling strings in the front office.
So it seemed last week when Prune Packers President Riley Sullivan announced the hiring of former professional player and veteran coach Joey Gomes as the team’s new Manager/General Manager for the upcoming 2014 campaign.
The announcement couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, coming the day after Gomes’ younger brother Jonny helped power the Boston Red Sox to a World Series win over the St. Louis Cardinals in six games.
Gomes, who will also serve as the Director of Baseball Development, takes the reins from former Prune Packer’s Manager Damon McGovran who piloted the team to a solid 31-25 record in his second season at the helm.
“Obviously Joey has baseball experience as a former pro player, which is great for our program,” Sullivan said. “He’s really good at training young players and cultivating talent. He brings a lot of pizzazz to the team so it’s really exciting to have him on board.”
The Prune Packers, an organization steeped in local baseball tradition, has established solid footing in the first two seasons since its revival. With all home games played at the newly renovated Recreation Park, the team has energized a new generation of fans that have found the Packers to be a great (and more affordable) alternative to Major League games.
“The baseball will take care of itself, but I want the community to embrace the team and be passionate about our program,” said Gomes, a former high school and college All-American at Casa Grande and Santa Clara University before playing pro ball in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “It doesn’t matter what level you’re competing at, we’ll be playing to win a championship.”
The team has utilized a roster of current and former college stars for the past two seasons, but hopes to dramatically increase the talent level in the years to come.
“I’ve already been in touch with college programs such as the University of Oregon and Santa Clara,” Gomes noted. “They’re ready to send me players but it will take a summer or two to get things established. We’ll be a Division-1 level program within two years,” he predicted.
The Prune Packers have upgraded their schedule for next year, leaving the Sacramento Rural League for the more competitive and prestigious Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. The team will kick off its 2014 campaign in May.