Pooky Gomez: One Man's Life in the Baseball Borderlands

"Pooky? The scout?"

"He's like a consultant, I think."

"You want to talk to the guy who sells bats?"

Pooky Gomez, 36, was the guy sitting right behind home plate with team owners and executives. I'd met him on the field before the game and assumed, from the way he leaned on the dugout railing and joked with the players in fluent English and Spanish, that he was a coach.

If you ask Pooky, he'll call himself a broker. Others call him an agent. His Instagram account is littered with photos of him on professional baseball fields along both sides of the border. Under one photo, of Gomez and Vinny Castilla, he and the former All-Star third baseman exchange compliments in the comments. Under another, taken before sunrise in the empty parking lot of a Food 4 Less, the floodlights resembling the lights of a ballfield, he writes, "From one Job to another cuz Hustle don't sleep."

***

Last season, Gomez, whose given name is Richard Alexander Gomez, worked a consulting role for Tijuana Toros of the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol, helping the team sort out its weaknesses and plug those gaps with American ringers down the stretch.

"Hey, do you know Lew Ford?" a Toros executive asked him.

He didn't, but he put out a call and within a few weeks the power-hitting former Major Leaguer was leaving the Long Island Ducks and crossing the border to join the Toros. Ford hit .372 with 23 RBIs and 26 runs scored over 30 games, leading the team past the heavily favored Mexico City Diablos in the first round of the playoffs.

After a few innings, on that first day I met Gomez, he left his box seats and joined me on the second deck. "I think the relationship I have with TJ, it's a multilayered relationship where they allow me to come into the stadium, be on the field, and allow me to go to the other side of the team," he said. "The way I see it, when I go to TJ, the first three innings are with (Toros executive Jorge) Campillo. Other than that, I'm on my own."

Gomez is short and well-built, with dark hair and strong features. He typically sports a close-cropped beard but no mustache, wearing sunglasses and collared t-shirts. He shook his head as he watched the bullpen fall apart in the late innings. It was a weakness he said he'd been warning the team about.

"I gotta get ready to go," he said, during one of many pitching changes. He had to get back home to Los Angeles.

After he left, I asked someone from the Toros front office if it was rare for an American to be plugged in to baseball on both sides of the border.

"He knows everybody," he said, shrugging. "He does a lot of things."

***

He doesn't like to call himself an agent, but Gomez has negotiated more than two dozen contracts for American and Japanese players looking to play in the Mexican leagues.

When CJ Retherford, a minor and independent league lifer, was cut by his Venezuelan winter league team, he wasn't sure how to proceed. The Dodgers organization had set him up down in Venezuela but now he was on his own. A friend recommended Gomez, who doesn't advertise his services. In less than a week, Gomez had three offers.

"Baseball, down here especially, is a very small, tight community," said Retherford. "It's who you know not what you know. You gotta know people. Knowing Pooky, he's a good person to know because he knows everybody."

Gomez, who's also negotiated contracts for players like Mac Suzuki, Pat O'Sullivan, and Demond Smith, learned the skills acting as a ventriloquist dummy for a former Mexican league star, Derrick White. After just over a hundred bats in the Major Leagues in the late '90s and a couple years in the minors, White found his pop in Mexico. Gomez served as his assistant for several years in the mid-2000s. He'd commute down to White's San Diego home, staying in his spare room for several nightsper week, crossing the border on game days, buying groceries, picking up his lunch, and taking his car to get washed.

"I'm learning the day-to-day rituals of a baseball player," he said. "I'm living with a baseball player. From getting up in the morning, having a good breakfast to taking a nap to going and working out in the gym, to make sure we leave the house at 3 p.m. because stretch is at 4:30." When White's son was in town, and Derrick was on the field, Gomez babysat.

"He's the guy that if you were in another state, you could call him and say, 'Hey man, I'm stranded,' and he'd come pick you up," White said.

White is a tough negotiator, but the Northern California-native struggled with the language barrier. Pooky became his mouthpiece. "I'm saying 'I'm calling on behalf of Derrick and for next year he wants this to be his salary. He wants to stay on the stateside, this and that,'" Gomez said of his calls to Mexican general managers.

When White wanted to stick to his guns, drive a hard bargain, it was Gomez who had to be strong with the powerful executives. "I'm laying into the guy and Pooky's like coming with this passive thing," White said, "and I'm like 'No, Pooky. Tell him what I'm saying.'"

Once word got out that Gomez had negotiated contracts for one of the league's best players, requests for help started rolling in.

***

Gomez's Trojan Horse is his job as a bat salesman. It's what brought him to White, and it has also introduced him to all-time greats like Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols. It gives him access to the front offices and the locker rooms on both sides of the border. "I'm Maxbat until the end of the trade show," he said of baseball's winter meetings. "After the trade show, I'm the broker, or liaison. 'I have a guy. You guys want him? I got four teams trying to negotiate with me for my guy.'"

MaxBat was founded in a garage in Minnesota and was completely unheard of in the Mexican leagues, which favored the big name brands like Louisville or Easton, until Gomez decided to sell them. Now about a third of the Mexican players use MaxBat; it's arguably the most popular bat in the league.

Gomez's route to bat sales reads like some reverse American dream.

In his early 20s, working as a candy-striper in an L.A. hospital, he started riding along with beer league softball buddies on his off days to games down in Mexico. One winter, these friends moved to Guaymas, on the west coast of Mexico, and Gomez spent weeks on their couch, using all his vacation time and taking multiple buses, criss-crossing the border several times in a single trip. He'd haunt the ballparks and try to get close to players for no reason other than an obsession with the game.

One day, while milling around a uniform shop, the owner learned he was from Los Angeles and asked if he'd like to sell jerseys back in the states. Gomez started meeting the owner's son halfway between Hermosillo and Los Angeles, near the international border, to pick up merch, which he'd sell from the trunk of his car at Sunday beer league softball games. Through Mexican baseball connections, he met Mark Flores, who was selling Glomar bats, then Route 66 bat, then MaxBats. They teamed up, adding bats to the merchandise in Gomez' trunk.

The owner of the uniform store introduced Gomez to Mexican league executives. Eventually, they sold a couple dozen bats to some of those executives. On one trip down to Tijuana, in which Gomez was going to watch his friend pitch—a trip in which Gomez's car overheated on an uphill stretch as he closed in on the border—he found MaxBat's posterchild: Derrick White. A friend got him into the clubhouse and Gomez sold White on a custom bat. Soon Gomez and Flores were taking turns driving dozens of bats down to White in Tijuana. Soon after that, the rest of the league took notice of the star's choice of lumber.

***

Last September, on the night I met him, Gomez left Estadio Gasmart in Tijuana and sat in the dark at the border crossing for something like the thousandth time in his life, and then drove the more than two hours north to his home southeast of Los Angeles, where he lives with his girlfriend, who he calls "my family." He got a couple hours of sleep, woke up at 4:30 a.m., took a shower, put on his uniform, and headed into work.

When Gomez leaves the bright lights of the Mexican ballparks and passes back into America, his primary job is stocking 7UP products on the shelves of grocery stores around Los Angeles. Throughout the shift, he's checking results and texting on one of his three business phones (American, Mexican, and MaxBat). When his shift ends, Gomez takes a nap, then wakes up and starts watching baseball, four games at a time: two on on his computer screens, one on a tablet, and one on his big screen TV.

He uses all of his vacation time, four weeks, to travel to Mexico for long stretches or to spring training and the winter meetings. Then, he usually uses an additional four weeks of unpaid time off to go to more ballparks in pursuit of the baseball dream. "Some of my co-workers that follow me on social media, they're like, 'Wait a minute, you're the guy that throws soda to the shelves at a Ralph's,'" he said, of his photos with pro ballplayers. "'How are you getting this access?'"

Mitch Poole, the Dodgers' clubhouse manager, once saw Gomez in his 7UP uniform and was taken back. "He saw me one time at a Target and he's like, 'Oh that's right, something's got to pay the bills," Gomez said.

What was Gomez getting paid for consulting for the Toros? Nada. He sees it as paying his dues and appreciates the access it gives him for bat sales. The contract negotiations started as a free service as well. He asked only that the players covered his phone bill. But eventually White demanded that Gomez charge for his services. Now he makes the relatively meager sum of $500 if the player signs, and an additional $500 if they make it past the all-star break. "I've been around the game long enough to know that a closed mouth doesn't get fed," White said. "You've got value. He sells himself short on that. I think things could move a lot faster for him if he didn't do that."

MaxBat pays travel and commission, but that too started as a break-even pursuit for Gomez. He'd buy the bats on consignment and flip them for a couple extra bucks when he managed to find buyers. When he sold the bats to White, who was a huge acquisition for the fledgling bat company, those were on consignment too.

Gomez's mother and father immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador, where they don't play much baseball. So many of the decisions he's made, both bold (like taking multiple buses to sleep on friends couches down in Mexico) and humble (like accepting low or no wages for valuable baseball work), seemed, to me, extremely unlikely. I kept asking him "Why?" and the answers inevitably always led back to anecdotes about his parents. His father, a gardener, saved up to buy his own gear and eventually ran his own routes. His mother made a savvy home-buying decision that pulled the family out of a neighborhood at the center of gang war and into a neighborhood with, among other things, baseball fields.

When his parents had a bit of extra cash, they used to give him and his younger sister $10 and drop them off on Sunset Boulevard for Dodgers games. After Gomez got caught tagging up the middle school and the police walked him through recess, his mother, who'd gotten Dodgers Fever after the signing of Mexican phenom Fernando Valenzuela, signed him up for Little League to keep him out of trouble. This is how he got the name. After he was arrested, his tagging name Poke (inspired by Gumby), became Pooky, after Chris Rock's character in New Jack City.

His late start in baseball meant that he was never very good. He didn't understand the game. In high school, he never played higher than J.V., and quit playing after graduation until his buddies recruited him to play softball. It was his time with White that taught him how to carry himself like a ballplayer. Once, while on a sales trip for MaxBat at a fall league ballpark in Mesa, Arizona Gomez bootlegged his way through scout school.

"I was sitting down doing my notes, people started sitting down. Is this a sellout crowd or what? It turns out scout school is about to go on," he said. "I put my earphones on and act like nothing and just start listening. I start listening to the instructor. What do you gotta look for, this and that. I'm like man, it's more complicated than I thought. I ended up becoming friends with the guy next to me and he started telling me more."

He uses the word "awe" frequently to describe all of the moments where he's gotten closer to the game than he ever thought he would. He was in awe when Barry Bonds picked him up and put him in a headlock. He was in awe when his cousin tagged along with him for a bat sale in the Dodgers' locker room: "We came here as kids, man." The border crossings and the nights on couches in small Mexican cities—those were never in pursuit of a job, he says, but just a need to get close to the game. "I was still just at awe for actually being there," he said. He was in awe the first time he met White, who loves Pooky but thinks he needs to learn to speak up.

"He could run a team in Mexico but he doesn't put himself in that position because he doesn't feel like he's qualified," White said. "He sells himself short on a lot of stuff he does. He watches enough baseball, he's got enough of an IQ, he's around big leaguers to everybody in Latin America. He speaks both languages fluently and he sees the games and he can get players. If he needs to get players for a Mexican team, he can get them."

This summer, the general manager of the team based in Lagunas is going to pay Pooky to find Mexican-American prospects—a step in the right direction but still not enough to allow him to quit stocking shelves. He wants kids, and he sees them in his near-future, but he feels like he needs to get his professional life nailed down first.

I asked him why he hasn't quit the 7UP gig to capitalize on his value: Start charging for every bit of consulting he does, every transaction, ask for more cash when he negotiates a contract. He recalled something Lou Lucca, a lifetime minor leaguer who played behind Albert Pujols and ultimately down in the Mexican leagues, told him.

"You're Latin and you're part of this," Gomez said. "Always remember this: You give back to your people. You give back to us. Somebody's going to make it before but don't forget. Because guess what: we're all going to get old, and when we get old are we still going to have our friends? Always pay it forward."

I asked him if he was worried that no one would ever pay it forward to him.

"There's been times but I've had a lot of faith," he said, "and it's been given back. Through all of this, I'm just the son of two immigrants. I'm just lucky to be here and be part of this."