Jeff Kent is going into the Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds is not. It’s not fair to Kent that his induction is tied to Bonds’ continued omission, but if there wasn’t a way to untangle them before, there certainly isn’t now. It was a cruel coincidence that they were on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee’s ballot, and then Kent had to go and get elected, while Bonds received fewer than five votes, which means his window is almost closed.
Hall of Fame announcements aren’t supposed to make you feel weird. There’s no way around this one, though. This one feels weird.
First, go back to the idea that it’s not fair to tether Kent’s induction to someone else’s career. It’s not. So let’s avoid it as long as we can. That’s easy for me to do, because I’ve been a believer in the Kent HOF case since the day he retired. It was a slam dunk for me, but I wasn’t exactly impartial. In 1997, I was watching Giants games as a fan, one of the rare dorks who actually liked the trade (mostly for Julián Tavárez) that brought him to San Francisco, so Kent didn’t need to do a lot of convincing.
That 1997 team is the one that turned me into a baseball fanatic, the reason you’re reading these words right now. The 1998 season was the one where I spent the summer as a vendor, hawking Cracker Jack over and over again to the same 5,403 people on a subarctic Tuesday night, but it was worth it because I’d get slightly preoccupied baseball for the first seven innings, and then I’d get totally free baseball after that. The 1999 season is when I said goodbye to my hideous concrete babysitter, I miss it so. The 2000 season is when there was a ballpark, a forever ballpark, the most beautiful ballpark, it’s still hard to believe. The 2001 season was …
You get the idea. It was a whirlwind for fans to go from Incredibly Sad Li’l Brandon Crawford to everything the Giants accomplished while Jeff Kent was there. All of it was the foundation of baseball to me before I was a writer, the teams that turned me into a decrepit baseball sicko and made me remember things like Tom Lampkin’s walk-up song (“Rooster,” by Alice in Chains).
Throughout all of this, Kent was great. Outstanding. Always there. His defense got a bad rap, but I tend to give more credence to the systems that view him more favorably. He was fine — pretty good to his left, weaker up the middle, but a reliable pivot man on the double play. He was also versatile before that was really a thing, playing all over the place whenever it suited the manager.
A lot of these arguments are emotionally charged, but I can also make a case for him in a way that anyone can understand, without WAR or other stats, and it goes something like this:
Jeff Kent hit like Orlando Cepeda, but he played second base.
That’s not just some heretic talking. Just look at the stats that I promised I wouldn’t use. They line up incredibly well. It’s a heckuva elevator pitch, and it gets the point across fast. So, yes, I support Kent in the Hall, but I’m also incredibly biased. It’s harder to make a rigorous statistical case, and I’m sympathetic to the Small Hall folks who argue in good faith that he doesn’t belong. It’s close. It’s really, really close, and there are a lot of better players who are still waiting to get in.
Which brings us to the inevitable, uncomfortable transition. Here’s where Barry Bonds has to reenter the story, because, yes, Kent was amazing, and he was there during the transition to the new ballpark, and the pennant, and he had that MVP season, but did you see what Bonds was doing at the same time? It was alien. Absolutely alien. The sport will never, ever see anything like it again. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are amazing spectacles in their own ways, but neither of them have ever had an on-base percentage within 20 points of the .480 mark that Bonds posted in his final season, when he was 42 years old. Again, that’s a full-time outfielder who put that OBP up at roughly the same age that Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — who are both retired — are right now.
Again, that’s not to take away from what Ohtani and Judge are doing. It’s just that Bonds was different. Astonishing. Unreal. Teams were terrified of Ohtani this postseason, and rightfully so, but it was nothing like the terror that Bonds inspired. Roger Clemens once intentionally walked him with two outs in the first inning of a scoreless game. Here’s Randy Johnson intentionally walking Bonds with runners on first and second. That’s one of the greatest left-on-left pitchers in the history of the game, deciding to load the bases on purpose because it was the only sensible thing to do.
Here’s a tally of all 688 of Bonds’ intentional walks to bookmark as a fun rainy day page. There’s fear, and then there’s fear. I was there, man. Sometimes literally.
Barry Bonds hits career home run No. 756. (Lisa Blumenfeld / Getty Images)
That’s Barry Bonds hitting his record-setting 756th home run. Enhance!
The Athletic. When history happens, we’re there for history. Or something. Mostly I just wanted to point out that I was closer to it than Baggs. Neener neener neener.
The best argument I can make for how I feel about Sunday’s news is to just describe the players. Because I can describe Kent’s career in extremely complimentary terms and argue his Hall of Fame case fervently. You might nod ahead while reading it. But when I describe Bonds, I have to take laugh breaks. I have to take breaks for lying on the ground and staring at the sky. I run out of words and just start typing “it was just different” in various contexts and languages, italicizing some, bolding others.
And yet one of these players is in the place that honors the players who tell the story of baseball. The other isn’t. I understand, yet I don’t. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is still a place without a Barry Bonds plaque in their wing honoring the best baseball players of all time. That’s like a Cartoon Rabbit Museum without Bugs Bunny, a Household Spice Hall of Fame without ground pepper or a Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame without Iron Maiden — unimaginable to the point of parody.
Still, it’s possible to compartmentalize and appreciate the news in its most basic form. Jeff Kent is finally in the Hall of Fame. He came to the Giants at a low point for the organization, and he thrived. He won an MVP and a pennant, and he set records for the second base position. Then he went to the Houston Astros, and I’m pretty sure he retired shortly after that.
Kent’s Giants career was a gift, perfectly timed for a franchise that needed it. He’s a deserving Hall of Famer in his own right. It’s a drag that he has to share some of the attention, but he’ll get over it. He has a Hall of Fame speech to prepare for.