Jeff Kent's Hall of Fame Selection

by Lincoln Mitchell

December 2025

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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Jeff Kent's selection to the Hall of Fame is defendable but many better players are still overlooked by the selection committees.

Like many fans, I was a bit surprised when Jeff Kent was the only person selected by the current era committee to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. My first thought was that although Kent was a very good player, he didn’t quite have Hall of Fame numbers. Moreover there was no larger story around him as, for example, was the case with Fernando Valenzuela or even Dale Murphy, that would have pushed Kent over the top. My other thought was that this process, because it is not an election, but a selection by a committee created by the Hall of Fame is indeed a very strange one.

Since Kent’s selection, I have thought more about his qualifications for the Hall of Fame. As many of his supporters pointed out, he has more home runs than any second baseman in baseball history. That is an impressive accomplishment, and Kent was clearly one of the best hitting second basemen ever. However, those kind of quirky statistics aren’t enough to make somebody a Hall of Famer.

The strongest argument against Kent is that a trio of second baseman who played a little bit before him, Bobby Grich, Willie Randolph, and Lou Whitaker, all were better players and are not in the Hall of Fame. The major piece of evidence to support that argument is that all three, Grich (71.1), Randolph (65.9) and Whitaker (75.1) had more WAR than Kent (55.4).

Clearly, a difference in WAR of somewhere between 10 and 20 is something that should not be overlooked, so Kent’s selection should lead to revisiting the Hall of Fame cases for these other players. However, there is something else to be considered here.

The main reason why Whitaker and Randolph have more WAR than Kent is defense. When only offensive production is considered, Kent and Grich are the best of the group. Kent's OPS+ plus of 123 is significantly better than that of the Randolph (104) or Whitaker (116). Grich, who was a power hitting second baseman in a lower offense era, had an OPS+ of 127, slightly higher than Kent. If only offensive WAR is considered, Kent (60.1) and Grich (62.6) are almost tied and trail Whitaker (67.7) mostly because he had a longer career, but defensive WAR tells a different story. Kent’s -0.1 defensive WAR is much less than Grich, Whitaker and Randolph, all of whom had more than 15 defensive WAR.

I saw all of these players while they were active. I watched, Kent and Randolph in particular, play a lot because they spent so much of their career with the Giants and Yankees

respectively. Based on what I saw it is clear to me that Randolph was a better defender than Kent. Bobby Grich and Lou Whittaker, who I saw play less frequently, were also considered to be much better defenders than Kent. The case against Kent boils down to him being a better hitter than Whitaker or Randolph, but those players making it up by being far better defenders. It is tougher to explain why Kent was a better player than Grich.

The question this raises is not whether Kent was a great defensive second baseman-he was not. The question is whether Whitaker and Randolph were such better defenders that Kent’s Hall of Fame case is also much weaker. This is a tougher question than it might seem because defensive WAR is not as reliable a number as offensive war. On the other hand, to believe that Kent was a better player than all of those other players is to somehow believe either that defense at second base doesn’t matter or that he was much better with the glove than either his reputation at the time or the advanced metrics indicate, and that is also hard to believe.

The other argument cited by Kent’s supporters is that he won the National League MVP award in 2000. I saw him play a lot that season. He was fantastic. It seemed that every time the Giants needed a big hit he got it. However, even at the time I recognized that he was not having the best year of any player in the Giants lineup.

Kent’s 2000 MVP award rests substantially on his 125 RBIs, an extraordinary number for anybody particularly a second basemen. In all of baseball history second basemen have only driven in 120 or more runs 17 times. Three of those seasons were Kent’s However, the reason Kent drove in so many runs in 2000 was largely because the guy batting in front of him walked 117 times.

Kent took advantage of a lot of opportunities to drive in runs but would not have had those opportunities if Barry Bonds hadn’t been batting ahead of him. Bonds was also the better player in 2000. That was clear to me from watching them on the field together, and the numbers tell a similar story. Bonds had more home runs, a higher on base and slugging percentage and an OPS of 1.127 compared to Kent’s 1.021. Both players were great on that division winning Giants club, but Bonds was better. However, for reasons that may now be tough to determine, Kent won that MVP award, and that framed his Hall of Fame case differently.

I no longer think that Jeff Kent’s selection to the Hall of Fame is some kind of inexcusable mistake, but nor am I convinced that he is a clear Hall of Famer. He comes close on the statistics, but gets no points for anything else. He was not an important or famous player. He was a very solid player for a long time who had three fantastic seasons between 2000 and 2002.

That is not meant to take anything away from Kent or his excellent career, but he still does not stand out from fellow second baseman, Grich, Whitaker or Randolph, other infielders of that earlier era notably Graig Nettles, Will Clark and Keith Hernandez as well as numerous outfielders, including Reggie Smith and Dwight Evans. As long as Kent is in the Hall of Fame and all of those are out, the process remains quirky and capricious.