Jonny Gomes’ victory speech at Union Station highlighted Royals’ working dichotomy

After the partying was done on a baseball field in Queens and the clubhouse beneath the Citi Field bleachers, the real celebrating began in a conference room on the second floor of the Omni Berkshire Place in Manhattan. That’s where many of the Royals’ wives and girlfriends joined in. Bottles of champagne and domestic beer and cigars were shared in abundance.

They laughed. They cried. They hugged. Alex Gordon even ate french fries, so you know it got wild.

“First time since he was 12,” pitcher Luke Hochevar says.

But the moment many of them most remember from the franchise’s first World Series celebration in 30 years happened around 3 in the morning in that conference room — on a long, and thankfully very sturdy, table.

The Royals have mostly kept this their secret: Jonny Gomes gave what some of them call the greatest speech they’ve ever heard.

“Epic stuff,” first baseman Eric Hosmer says.

Some of it is similar to what Gomes said two days later after the parade on stage at Union Station while holding an American flag. Other parts were more personal. All of it was laced with certain words we can’t print here, and fueled with the drinks of an adult party.

“Unbelievable moment right there,” shortstop Alcides Escobar says.

“What you heard on stage would be like PG-plus, but at the hotel it was a little different,” pitcher Kris Medlen says.

“I have the video of it on my phone,” infielder Christian Colon says.

Oh, really?

Colon did not want to show me the video. Not at first, anyway. He says a radio station offered him $20,000 for it but he turned them down.

“That’s private, man,” he says. “That’s private.”

Gomes is playing in Japan and could not be reached to comment. But Colon agreed to let me watch the video after clearing it with him. One morning during spring training, he pulled out his cellphone and offered me a chair.

“That’s Jonny,” he says, nodding at the screen. “Jonny on the table.”

Gomes is wearing a black T-shirt and blue mesh shorts with a Royals logo. He is standing on the table, his head nearly touching the ceiling, clearly buzzed but still speaking with the kind of intense charisma you see from professional wrestlers or presidents in movies — all while masterfully stepping over boxes of pizza and bottles of Heineken and Coke and Bud.

Gomes was speaking spontaneously, without a script, but it’s hard to imagine the words being improved with a teleprompter. His voice was loud without yelling and steady until the parts he wanted to emphasize.

“What you did took talent, emotion, heart, balls and brains,” Gomes says. “Surround yourself with great people, and great things will happen.”

Gomes owns the room, and he knows it. Colon says he thinks Gomes would make a great manager someday, because “he knows how to get to people.” Colon credits Gomes with helping him stay prepared without playing much during the playoffs. Gomes’ words and encouragement kept Colon’s mind in a place where he was able to deliver the go-ahead pinch-hit in the 12th inning a few hours before this speech.

“You are now part of the hardest group to get into in baseball,” Gomes says from the table. “Understand what the (expletive) you all just did.”

This is the part where Gomes’ private speech most mirrors the public one: You took down the rookie of the year ... You took down the MVP ... You took down the Cy Young winner ...

Watching Gomes on this video is watching a master at work. Gomes has thought of a post-baseball career as a coach, manager or perhaps a broadcaster, and it’s easy to see him succeeding at anything that rewards communication and motivation.

He is a baseball nerd, his brain something of an automatic search engine for statistics and history. His words come out with passion, his natural pauses allowing the audience to join in — the video is full of cheers punctuating Gomes’ words with, “(Expletive) yeah!” — and his message is resonating with the people who heard it.

“There’s one thing in Major League Baseball that can’t be erased,” Gomes says on the video. “And that’s an anniversary. The men who’ve won the triple crown, do we celebrate that? Are we going to celebrate Ted Williams hitting .406 in 1941? No. What you celebrate is winning. We still celebrate the 1985 championship until this day. And now, we will celebrate this one.”

The room fills with cheers. Gomes is triumphant. This is the picture of achievement. This is also where Colon turns the video off. He’s shown enough.

The Gomes speech is more than a cool moment, and more than a fun secret. It’s also a perfect symbol of an internal conflict the Royals have had for years, and managed expertly.

The generational gap between the men on the field and the ones who coach and manage the roster is most obvious in their view of these types of moments. In the clubhouse, Gomes’ speech is unanimously adored. It was fun, it was funny, it was inspiring.

“It kind of completed the journey that we experienced,” Medlen says.

“At that point in time, everyone stopped and realized how big a moment it was,” Hosmer says. “He just broke it down for us.”

Elsewhere, however, Gomes’ speech goes against a fundamental view of the game held by some in the organization. Gomes’ moment at the parade was seen by some as showy, crude and delivered by the wrong guy — the stage was filled with players who’d been with the Royals for years; Gomes came to KC on Aug. 31 and was left off all the Royals’ playoff rosters.

But those are just differing worldviews. What’s telling is how they are managed. Ned Yost’s success with this particular group largely came after a conscious decision he made to let them be themselves. Blast music in the clubhouse, dump Gatorade on the guy doing the postgame interview, bring in a disco ball and smoke machine to celebrate wins.

That kind of thing could not be more different than how Yost was taught players should behave, but he is smart and self-aware enough to realize that doesn’t matter. What’s important is how these players feel, and how they perform.

A similar evolution happened in the front office. The Royals have a humble, quiet, suit-and-tie culture but have come to appreciate that the same is not natural or best for their players. They learned to trust that, and to see their celebrations as harmless.

The important part is not how a bat flip looks on television, but how those players prepare their bodies and minds. The important part is not how loud Fetty Wap plays on the clubhouse speakers, but how hard and focused the players are on the field.

Some of the stuff on the fringe makes some of the Royals’ coaches and executives uncomfortable, but they all appreciate the intensity, which in the end is all that matters. The players earn freedom and flexibility by deflecting credit, respecting coaches and obsessing on subtle fundamentals like secondary leads and hitting the relay man.

So, in that way, the Gomes speech is directly opposed to the way much of the team’s management was raised to believe the game should be.

Their ability to reconcile that with something more important made them all better, and created memories they’ll carry forever.

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 12:44 PM with the headline "Jonny Gomes’ victory speech at Union Station highlighted Royals’ working dichotomy."