As a player, Gomes was sent down to the minor leagues on 12 occasions in his five years with the Rays. And every time it happened, it piqued his curiosity about baseball operations a little bit more.“Just the nature of my career, I was very average,” Gomes said recently with a chuckle. “I would get sent down or see different moves happen, so it was always interesting to me how the mechanics of it all worked.
“He sought us out in the front office and had a bunch of questions about how he could improve, and what we were seeing through our lens,” Friedman said. “I’ve been around a lot of other players that slot into that part of the roster and they haven’t necessarily had that, especially while playing.” The Fall River, Mass., native wasn’t drafted out of high school, despite a stellar two-way prep career in which he was named the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior.
“Throughout my career, there was just an interest overall in how things worked and general roster construction,” he said. “Obviously it’s not a major focus when you’re playing, but I always found it interesting and would ask questions whenever I was around our front-office group in Tampa.” And in 2015, Gomes committed himself to learning about pitch mechanics and analytics, ratcheting up his slider usage after seeing data that ranked it as one of the best in the majors.
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