SCOTTSDALE — Jeff Kent smiled Sunday morning and said he doesn’t have a lot of contacts saved in his cell phone. If you’re not on that small list, he isn’t inclined to answer.
Kent doesn’t intend to waste much of retirement dealing with scammers, but when an unfamiliar number came up on the screen this winter, he briefly changed course.
“I said, ‘You know what, I haven’t talked to a robo-caller in a while. I’ll take this call,’ ” he joked Sunday morning.
Right away, Kent realized that it wasn’t someone trying to sell him something. He also realized he had gotten very lucky by choosing to answer that specific call.
“Hello, Jeff?” the voice on the other end said. “Jeff, this is Johnny Bench.”
That has been the reality for the former Giants second baseman since he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in December. Kent said he was floored that Bench, a 1989 inductee, would reach out, but he was far from alone. The last couple of months have been spent answering calls and texts from men who already are enshrined in Cooperstown.
Soon it will be Kent’s turn, and he has started to work on his speech and think about what anecdotes to tell on July 26. Kent said he’s still trying to find the right words to describe all of this, and that includes another honor he recently found out about.
The Giants will retire Kent’s No. 21 on Aug. 29, putting him alongside the previous Hall of Famers since they moved to San Francisco, along with Barry Bonds and Will Clark. Given how many numbers the Giants already have retired and the ones that are coming — Buster Posey should get elected to the Hall this December — it was no guarantee that the Giants would pull No. 21 out of circulation. Kent said it’s “overwhelming.”
“When I played you looked at the guys’ numbers — McCovey, Mays, and those guys that were in the locker room — and getting my name put on the Wall of Fame was cool, and now the number (retirement),” Kent said. “It’s hard for me to give you an adjective that describes it. It’s not cool, it’s not neat, it’s not great, it’s not surreal. There is no word yet that I’ve been able to find. You talk about my speech and I’m still searching for what that real description is. I don’t have one, and I guess that’s how meaningful it is.
“I’m still searching for that because I am overwhelmed.”
Kent has been at Scottsdale Stadium this weekend to meet with the new staff and players, although he said he’s mostly trying to stay out of the way. The advice he always has given young players is more on the mechanics side, and he knows that it’s hard to help someone make meaningful changes in just a day or two.
When it comes to the big story of camp, though, Kent already is on board. His son, Kaeden, played infield at Texas A&M, and when he didn’t get much playing time his first two years, the family tried to get word to Tony Vitello that he would like to transfer to Tennessee.
Kaeden Kent ended up staying in Texas, and it all worked out. He was taken in the third round of the 2025 MLB Draft by the New York Yankees, and his proud father will visit his camp in Florida later this spring.
Kent joked Sunday that he disliked Vitello initially because the Vols knocked his son’s team out of the College World Series, but he respected the way Vitello’s team played.
“Tony kind of rebuilt that program at Tennessee to be something proud that now they have,” Kent said. “Tennessee was dead in the dumps and they got Tony, and he kind of rebuilt them and I was impressed with what he did.
“I watched his passion on the field and I watched how he treated his players and how he backed his players, and I wanted that for my own kid, too.”
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