Second baseman Jeff Kent was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Contemporary Baseball Era committee on Sunday. Seven other former Major League Baseball greats, including Kent’s ex-teammate Barry Bonds, did not receive enough votes from the 16-member group.
“I’ve used all my cry rags already. I don’t have any more,” Kent said. “The emotions are overwhelming. Unbelievable. I didn’t even expect it for me. There are so many quality guys. …I’m grateful that they considered me and gave it a shot for putting me in.”
Kent, who batted .290 with 377 home runs and 1,518 RBIs during his 17-year career split between the Toronto Blue Jays, New York Mets, Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers, received 14 votes from the committee.
Twelve were required to gain admission to the Hall of Fame. Carlos Delgado, who hit 473 homers in his 17-year career, was closest among the other seven players on the ballot with nine votes. Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy received six votes apiece while Bonds, Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield and Fernando Valenzuela collected fewer than five.
Kent, 57, earned the National League’s 2000 Most Valuable Player award, appeared in five All-Star Games during his 30s and won four Silver Slugger awards. He stands as the all-time leader in home runs among players who spent the majority of their career at second base.
“The turning point in my career was with Dusty Baker, the manager that I got with in San Francisco (in 1997),” Kent said. “He was a hitting coach. He really motivated me to get the peak performance out of me. That was a place that I started to learn how to go the other way. … I was a dead-pull hitter young in my career and I started to turn it around in San Francisco.”
For the analytically inclined, Kent amassed 55.4 WAR and a 123 OPS-plus. Hall of Fame second basemen Ryne Sandberg and Roberto Alomar posted 68.0 WAR and 67.0 WAR, respectively.
All eight players on the Contemporary Baseball Era ballot failed to reach the Hall of Fame during their years of eligibility with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
When Kent became eligible for the Hall in 2014, he received 15.2% of the vote. That number gradually trended upward to the point where he collected 46.5% of the vote in 2023, his final year on the BBWAA ballot.
Delgado became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2015 and received just 3.8% of the vote. He did not reach the 5% threshold to remain on future BBWAA ballots.
Mattingly, who posted a .307 batting average and 222 home runs during a 14-year career that soured due to injury, gained 28.2% of the BBWAA voting in his first year of eligibility before steadily declining. He received 50% of the vote from the Veterans committee in 2023.
Murphy, who won back-to-back MVP awards along with five Gold Gloves and four Silver Slugger awards, never gained more than 23.2% of the vote during his 15 years of BBWAA eligibility. He claimed 37.5% of the vote from the 2023 Veterans committee.
