Jeff Kent has never forgotten the state of the Giants’ fanbase when he arrived in San Francisco.
On Nov. 13, 1996, Brian Sabean traded Matt Williams to Cleveland for Kent, José Vizcaino and a player to be named later. Williams was a homegrown star, and Giants fans were furious that Sabean, a rookie general manager, decided to trade a franchise pillar as his first act. So, Sabean defended himself in the bluntest way possible.
“The media called him an idiot,” Kent said. “His comment to them was to say, ‘I’m not an idiot. Just wait. Just watch.’”
Over the next six seasons, Kent proved Sabean made the right move.
Kent evolved from a good player to a great one, crediting Giants manager Dusty Baker with motivating him to find a new level to his game. And on Sunday, after being passed over on the ballot the last decade, Kent will be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame due in large part to his time as a Giant.
“It’s a bigger emotional deal than I ever thought it was going to be,” Kent said in a recent Zoom call with reporters leading up to the ceremony. “I still tear up talking about it, and I’ve tried to figure out why. Is it because of the game? Is it because I finally got in? Why are my emotions so attached to this?”
Baker has managed other Hall of Famers such as Ken Griffey Jr. and Scott Rolen, but Kent is the first player going into Cooperstown who Baker managed for the bulk of his prime.
“I thought he should’ve been in the whole time, but I’m not the one voting,” said Baker, the former Giants manager who could be on this winter’s contemporary Hall of Fame ballot for managers, executives and umpires.
Kent, the all-time leader in home runs as a second baseman, will become the sixth player to go into the Hall of Fame as a Giant since the team moved to the West Coast, joining Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry and Orlando Cepeda. Next month, the Giants will retire his No. 21 at Oracle Park.
Along with Kent, Carlos Beltran, who played with the Giants for the second half of the 2011 season, and former Braves star Andruw Jones also will be inducted on Sunday. It’s a coronation that Kent assumed would never happen.
During his 10 years on the writers’ ballot, Kent never came close to being voted in. Kent appeared on 46.5% of ballots in his final year of eligibility in 2023, well below the 75% needed for election. But this past winter, Kent had another shot at immortality.
Kent was one of eight players on the 2025 Contemporary Era ballot, a list headlined by Barry Bonds, Kent’s longtime Giants teammate and the all-time home run king. The ballot also featured Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield and the late Fernando Valenzuela. Kent not only received 14 votes among the 16-member committee, but is the only player on that list headed to Cooperstown.
“He was pretty much the best at his position, especially offensively, for a good number of years with a lot of other good players at that position,” said Rich Aurilia, Kent’s teammate with the Giants from 1997-2002.
Kent spent the first five seasons of his career with the Toronto Blue Jays, the New York Mets and Cleveland. The former Cal star was a fine player, hitting .274 with a pair of 20-home run seasons in 1993 and 1995. In San Francisco, he evolved into one of the best power-hitting second basemen of all time.
The Giants’ Jeff Kent completes a double play to end the seventh inning against the Diamondbacks Sunday at Pac Bell Park. (John J. Kim/Bay Area News Group)
From 1997 to 2002, Kent had a .297 batting average and .903 OPS while totaling 175 home runs and 689 RBIs. During that span, Kent averaged about 29 homers and 115 RBIs per season. He earned three All-Star selections and in 2000, he took home the NL MVP. The vitriol was gone; Kent was a star.
“That was the turning point of my career,” Kent said in December of being traded to San Francisco. “When I got to San Francisco, Dusty Baker lit a fire under me to be better — not to achieve the normal standard but to achieve more. Dusty was a guy that really understood how to get the best out of his players and I think he knew I had more to give.”
Kent’s offense was his calling card as a player, but Aurilia and Baker argued that Kent was an underrated defender.
Aurilia, a former shortstop, attested that no one turned a double play better than Kent, a converted third baseman.
“I hated that he got this rep as a bad defensive second baseman, because he was better than average,” Aurilia said.
For all his production, Aurilia and Baker couldn’t think of many individual moments that jumped out from Kent’s time as a Giant. Aurilia cited Kent showing a bit of emotion when he homered in Game 5 of the 2002 World Series, but nothing else came to mind. It wasn’t an indictment of Kent, but rather a reflection of his metronomic consistency and low-key personality.
“The thing about Jeff,” Baker said, “is he was consistently good and boring. He was Steady Eddie.”
If anything, Kent’s most notable moments happened off the field.
In 2002, Kent and Bonds infamously fought one another in the visiting dugout during a game at the San Diego Padres’ Qualcomm Stadium, an altercation that was caught on camera. That same year, led by those two hitters, the Giants made their first World Series since 1989.
Bonds and Kent weren’t exactly the best of buddies, but those who spent time around them will testify that they elevated one another.
“Competition on the other side is always good, but some competition on your side is good as long as there’s no envy or jealousy involved in a competition,” Baker said. “Sometimes you need that.”
“Those guys both know what they meant to each other,” Aurilia said. “I felt like they both pushed each other.”
There is one other moment that’s impossible to forget when looking back on Kent’s career: the “car wash” incident.
Just months before his brouhaha with Bonds, Kent broke his wrist during spring training after crashing while popping wheelies on his motorcycle. Then, in an attempt to hide the truth, Kent said the injury came when he fell off his truck while washing it. The statute of limitations has long expired, and on Sunday, maybe Kent will finally be willing to share the details.
“That’ll die with me,” Kent laughed. “But what you think happened, there’s some truth to it. What did happen — what I said happened — there’s some truth to that.”
There’s one detail that often gets left out of the “car wash” fiasco. Following the incident, Kent hit a career-high 37 home runs and helped bring the Giants within one game of a World Series title. That season, combined with the five that preceded it, are a large part of why he’ll be enshrined in Cooperstown this weekend.
Kent may not have been welcomed in San Francisco with open arms back in 1997 because of the circumstances that brought him to the Bay. But when he returns to Oracle Park next month, his jersey retirement will be the ultimate vindication that Sabean made the right move.
San Francisco Giant Jeff Kent watches his first of two homeruns against the Anaheim Angels during game five of the World Series at Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, CA. on Thursday, October 24, 2002. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group archive)