Jeff Kent, now a Hall of Fame second baseman, during the height of his career, as a Giant.
In 1999, during which he earned his first All-Star selection, Jeff Kent told Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz that, growing up, “I never watched baseball on TV. It’s slow and boring. I’m not a fan. Never was.” Well.
He played the game as a boy growing up in southern California, but it seems to have been a joyless activity. That, in turn, seems to have been the product of parenting in which his father, a motorcycle policeman of stern perfectionism, who took his children to Dodgers games, grounded his son similarly.
“I’d go 3-for-4,” he told Lidz, “and he’d chastise me for the out. I’d throw a one-hitter, and he’d tell me I could have gotten the hitter on a curve.” Reading that, you suspect that, if the boy Kent had broken his league’s home run record, the father would have harped and carped on the ones he missed. If he’d pitched a perfect game, perhaps Pop would have snarked about the ones the boy didn’t get over the plate.
Will Kent take his election to the Hall of Fame by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee as a vindicating rebuke to such dubious parenting? Hard to say unless you can read his mind. More than one profile has revealed Kent as a high school player with both an “attitude problem” and a discomfort being sandwiched between a coach not unlike his father and teammates who itched for him to stand up for them.
Marry his father’s negativism to his apparently unpleasurable high school playing experience, and perhaps you get a better sense of how Kent came by a personality that either unnerved or annoyed teammates and reporters. It might have pained him to consider, but Kent had experienced joyless parental judgmentalism comparable to his eventual teammate/rival Barry Bonds. Bonds grew up having similar skirmishes with his own haunted, major league playing father. It only began with coming home from school with B’s on his report cards and hearing Pop’s retort, “B’s ain’t A’s, boy.”
Maybe that’s why Kent would earn a too-quick reputation as a malcontent after he was dealt as a rookie to the Mets (for star pitcher David Cone) in August 1992. His new teammates treated him to a rookie-hazing prank; he reacted with fury. From the Mets to the Indians to the Giants, Kent seemed to have a reputation as a solid enough player and something of a head case.
As a Giant, he launched a six-season run in which he’d hit at least 20 home runs and drive at least 100 runs home. He owed it to two things: 1) He picked up on lifting his hands a little more at the plate from Hall of Fame designated hitter Edgar Martinez; and, 2) he had Bonds’s protection in the lineup batting ahead of him. Come 2002, come highs and lows.
The lows began in spring training, when he tried claiming that he’d injured himself washing his truck but it turned out he’d done it popping motorcycle wheelies. They continued when a scuffle with Bonds prompted him to tell manager Dusty Baker he wanted off the Giants. The highs included a career-high 37 home runs, and a two-bomb World Series Game Five against the ultimately triumphant Angels. He also took a stand against actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, admirably.
He went from there to have good seasons with the Astros. (And shine in Game Five of the 2004 National League Championship Series, a three-run bomb off Cardinals closer Jason Isringhausen.) From there, a two-year deal with his hometown Dodgers that turned into an extension. He’d have his moments again, but the injuries began taking a toll. He found himself questioning how professional some of his younger teammates truly were; his final postseason saw him limited to the bench after mid-season knee surgery.
When he elected to retire rather than try one more season in 2008, Kent let his vulnerability show. He also showed himself, as I’ve written before, a man who learned to say hello when it was time to say goodbye. “I’ve learned to love and appreciate the fans,” he said in an emotional announcement, “and I’ve learned to love and appreciate the Jeff Kent haters out there, too.”
I’m thankful for those people even more than the fans who gave me a hug every day, because those people motivate you . . . I leave this game proud that I have treated it with the utmost respect . . . I have tried to carry on a legacy of winning wherever I have gone. Any integrity that I have had in this game is something that I’m very, very proud of. I believe I played this game right, and I believe I’m leaving this game right.
His Hall of Fame case seemed almost entirely in his bat and his counting statistics: the most home runs by any expansion-era second baseman, among other things. (His black ink is limited to leading his league twice in sacrifice flies.) But would you believe that, by my Real Batting Average metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by plate appearances), Kent is the best batter among the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era second basemen?
That’s batter, not hitter.
Mazeroski’s is the lowest RBA among such second basemen, but he’s in the Hall of Fame because he’s still the single most run-preventive second baseman who ever played the major league game. Kent’s defensive statistics aren’t even in the same quadrant: he was 52 defensive runs below his league average. It cost him plentiful wins above a replacement-level player (WAR) and moved him outside the top twenty second basemen of all as Baseball Reference sees him.
Kent dropped off the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot after ten years in which he’d climbed steadily to 46.5 percent of the vote. The Contemporary Era Committee elected him to Cooperstown with fourteen out of sixteen possible votes, the only committee candidate to make it.
“The time had gone by, and you just leave it alone, and I left it alone,” Kent told a conference call after the committee result came. “I loved the game, and everything I gave to the game I left there on the field. This moment today, over the last few days, I was absolutely unprepared. Emotionally unstable.”
The guy who once admitted motivation from his critics while trying to exist in his own isolated baseball world now admitted that achieving the game’s highest honour caught him off guard and vulnerable. It’s enough to make you wish that Kent could have allowed this side of himself more room to breathe at the plate, at second base, in the clubhouse.
Of the rest of the Contemporary Era Committee candidates, Bonds plus Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela, made fewer than five ballots. Meaning the Hall of Fame’s new protocol makes them ineligible to return the next time the Contemporary Era Committee considers post-1980 players. They can return to that committee’s ballot after that, but another five-or-less-votes shortfall removes them from Hall consideration permanently.
But it also means Carlos Delgado, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy can return on the next Contemporary Era Committee ballot, in 2028.
Kent wouldn’t commit to whether Bonds deserved a berth in Cooperstown, a stance he’s maintained from the moment each first became Hall eligible. “Barry was a good teammate of mine. He was a guy that I motivated and pushed,” Kent told the call.
We knocked heads a little bit. He was a guy that motivated me at times, in frustration, in love, at times both. Barry was one of the best players I ever saw play the game, amazing. For me, I’ve always said that. I’ve always avoided the specific answer you’re looking for, because I don’t have one. I don’t. I’m not a voter.
Time mellows even the harshest of rivals often enough.
Throneberry Fields Forever 