I’m not thrilled as I see Kent as a Hall of Very Good.
I would have been happier with Dale Murphy. There is an argument for the good of the game with Murph as me and thousands more tuned in to watch him play during those awful Braves game when WTBS was ubiquitous.
Yeah, Murph was absolutely an ambassador of the game during a time when not many games were broadcast nationwide. That should be a point in his favor.
Don’t understand the Kent pick at all.
Most batting runs by a 2B since Joe Morgan (tho Altuve looks likely to pass him very soon), 7th-most all time. Not any deeper than his bat carried the day.
An interesting thing I noted in the ESPN article on Kent’s selection:
I just saw a graphic on Facebook from MLB Network, which showed vote totals:
(A player needed 12 out of 16 votes (75%) to be selected.)
For the other four, it simply said “fewer than 5 votes.” So, not only did the committee not select Bonds or Clemens, but it wasn’t even close.
And, most HRs ever hit by a second baseman: 351 of his 377 career homers were hit while he was playing second.
So, yeah, that’s probably it. Slugging second baseman.
So a guy sets the record for homers by a second baseman during a certain era and nobody suspects a thing. Okay, then. Maybe Kent was cleans as a whistle, but nobody knows. All these voters pretend like they know, but they don’t know shit.
He wasn’t among the players named in the Mitchell Report, and he apparently was one of the players of that era who was particularly outspoken against the use of PEDs, and advocated for more stringent testing.
OTOH, maybe he made those statements to cover his tracks. Hard to say.
As a Jays fan I love Carlos Delgado, and that man could hit, but him getting over half the committee while the rest of the ballot got less than half is insane.
Carlos was a slugger but he is not a Hall of Famer at all. He’s Jack Clark.
The Mitchell Report is fairly useless. Sure, they had a couple of sources and turned up a lot of names, but somehow entire teams were clean. It didn’t come close to uncovering the true scope of PED usage in MLB.
One thing everyone should have learned from the investigations was that body-type wasn’t a smoking gun.
Curt Schilling railed against hitters getting bulked up on steroids and demanded testing. Would I bet the farm that Schilling didn’t use HGH? I would not.
This is so true. The hypocrisy is hard to take. Kent was a pretty good player from 1992-1996. Then he landed on the Giants with Barry Bonds and started crushing the ball at a rate far beyond what he had done earlier. And this was mainly while he was after what is typically a MLB player’s offensive peak.
I’m supposed to believe that he suddenly went from a 107 OPS+ hitter to a 136 OPS+ after he turned 29? I know the offensive environment changed, but most HOF voters seem to attribute that changed environment to steroid use, not a juiced ball or whatever.
One thing I know for sure is that if I’m going to tell the story of the SF Giants from 1998 to 2002, I’m not going to start by talking about Jeff Kent. And yet he’s the guy in the Hall of Fame. It’s ridiculous, and makes the Hall nearly useless as a repository of the game’s history.
When he was 24, thin as a rail, and had probably never even taken an aspirin let alone a steroid, Barry Bonds was a better baseball player then Jeff Kent would ever be.
And Kent’s best years came when he was hitting in front of a video game cheat code.
It’s really silly.
The Anabolic All-Stars will get into the Hall of Fame, eventually. As Pete Rose will. Not crying about the wait.
Speaking about suspicious stats, how come Bert Campaneris hit 22 home runs in 1970 but never more than 8 HR in any other season? What’s up with that? Hmmm?
I don’t disagree, but three of the four guys who got “fewer than five votes” yesterday – Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield – were named on the report. And other guys who were either in that report, or otherwise credibly linked to PEDs – A-Rod, Pettite, Manny, Ryan Braun, etc. – similarly are likely to remain on the outside, looking in.
Would I be surprised, in the least, if Kent (or Schilling) did use them? Not in the slightest. But, the evidence against them is more circumstantial, and the Hall voters don’t seem to be as concerned with that.
Someday, maybe. Under the Hall’s new rules, Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield only get one more bite at the apple, and unless the committee voters’ opinions change drastically in 2031, they won’t make it in, in the foreseeable future.
The “eras committee” thing isn’t working. The Veterans Committee thing didn’t work well either, but this is not an improvement.
Kent fails the Keltner List almost across the board.
Thank you for that; I had forgotten about the Keltner List.
Looking at it, one could argue for Kent on #11 (MVP-level play; he won an MVP award, and was in the top 10 in voting three other times), and maybe #5 (could continue to play effectively even after his prime; he was still playing reasonably well to age 39).
The argument for Kent seems to be “best power-hitting second baseman ever.” The issue, of course, is that he was mediocre up through age 28; in 1997, he joined the Giants, his HR rate went up, and his BA went up…and all of that in the heart of the steroids era, while sharing a locker room with Bonds, and typically batting behind the guy, who got walked a ton.
So, all else being equal, it’s hard for an unbiased evaluator to look at Kent’s numbers during his six best seasons (which coincide with his six seasons in San Francisco) neutrally.
C.f. Rafael Palmiero?
One major difference is that, unlike Kemp, Palmiero did flunk a PED test, and did get a brief suspension for it. (He was also named as a steroid user in Jose Canseco’s book, but Canseco is a POS, and it’s hard to take anything he says at face value.)
Yes, my point is that he attempted to paint himself as opposed to steroid use recall, then very quickly after that tested positive. I always wondered if he got denied entry into the Hall based on a false positive, but I’ve been told that for roids that is basically impossible. shrug We also have the possibility of him having used a supplement that he thought was clean, but wasn’t.
Rafael Palmiero is basically Billy Williams, Part 2. Palmiero’s stats are superficially better, but they aren’t really, if you adjust for the offensive levels of the times they played in. Both were so so defensive value guys, lefthanded power hitters, no/little playoff success.
Another thing about Palmiero, he got busted in his final season at age 40. Who knows what he did throughout the course of his career, but man did he blow it. With 3000 hits and 500 homers, it’s hard to believe he would have been denied the Hall just because Canseco made an accusation. Canseco also named Ivan Rodriguez and he made it in.