Jeff Kent spent 17 years in the big leagues earning a reputation as one of the surliest men to ever strap on a second baseman’s mitt. He’s about to spend 10 minutes on a stage in Cooperstown proving he’s got more going on under the shell than anybody gave him credit for.
On a conference call with reporters Friday morning, the 2000 National League MVP — elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Contemporary Era committee after a decade of rejection by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America — had to stop talking multiple times. His eyes welled up. He cursed at himself. He tried to figure out why.
“I had accepted that it just wasn’t going to happen,” Kent said. “It’s a bigger emotional deal than I ever thought it was going to be. I still tear up talking about it.”
The BBWAA never gave Kent more than 46.5% of the vote across his 10 years on the ballot. The 75% threshold stayed out of reach. A 16-member Contemporary Era panel saw what the writers didn’t, electing Kent alongside Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones. All three will be inducted July 26 in Cooperstown, with more than 60 Hall of Famers expected to be seated behind them and a crowd of 10,000-plus in front.
Kent will go in wearing a San Francisco Giants cap on his plaque. He hit 175 of his 377 career home runs across six seasons by the Bay — the best stretch of his career, including the 2000 MVP season when he batted .334 with 33 homers and 125 RBI for an NL West champion. His 351 home runs as a second baseman are the most at the position in major-league history. Rogers Hornsby sits second in the 20-homer, 100-RBI seasons category with five; Kent had eight.
The Giants will retire his No. 21 later this summer at Oracle Park.
None of that is what cracked him open on the call. What cracked him open was a mustache and a necklace.
Kent wore both nearly every day of his career. The mustache was a tribute to his father, a former police officer. The gold chain — “a dinky gold necklace,” he called it — was a gift from his mother before he turned pro. Neither will be represented on his plaque.
“Golly,” Kent said, choking up. “My mustache was a reminder if you will of — of …”
He stopped. “S–t, this is gonna be hard.”
“Now they wear 15 necklaces and mustaches like it’s nothing,” Kent said, wiping back tears. “In my era, if you wore a mustache you were an idiot or they called you a porn star. I got ripped on that all the time. … I [was] the only guy in the shower with a mustache and a necklace on, and people are looking at me like I was weird. Those two things were not baseball related but just reminders of where I came from.”
Kent retired after the 2008 season with a .290 career average, 1,518 RBI, 560 doubles, and four Silver Slugger Awards. He was a 20th-round draft pick — 523rd overall — by the Blue Jays in 1989 out of Cal, where he’d made the roster as a walk-on. Toronto traded him to the Mets for David Cone in 1992. The Mets shipped him to Cleveland. Cleveland sent him to San Francisco. He kept hitting, and the game kept moving him around like furniture nobody knew where to place.
These days Kent lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Dana. He chases grandkids and cows and rides motorcycles. He appeared on Season 25 of “Survivor,” finishing 10th — the only Hall of Famer who can say that. His son Kaeden plays in the Yankees’ minor-league system and will be in Cooperstown next weekend, rehabbing a finger injury that conveniently frees up his schedule.
“This is going to be the first baseball function that I believe I’ve had my entire family together,” Kent said. “This is the biggest baseball function, so everybody’s coming to that. I’ll probably shed a tear or two for that.”
The induction ceremony airs July 26 at 10:30 a.m. Pacific on MLB Network.
Sources:
- Yahoo Sports — Jeff Kent ’emotional’ ahead of going into Hall of Fame as Giant
- National Baseball Hall of Fame — Jeff Kent bio
- r/baseball — “It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Good” discussion