Jeff Kent’s election to the Baseball Hall of Fame is going to provide a boost to players representing one of Cooperstown’s most underrepresented positions.
It just may be a while before a second baseman can point to Kent as the player who helped him get over the top.
Kent will become the 23rd second baseman ushered into baseball immortality next Sunday, when he joins centerfielders Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones on the Clark Sports Center stage a little more than a mile from the Hall of Fame.
Kent was elected last December, when he received 14 of the 16 votes from the contemporary baseball era committee. A month later, fellow keystone star Chase Utley positioned himself for induction far sooner than later by finishing with 59.1 percent of the vote, the third-largest share behind Beltran and Jones. A candidate must finish with 75 percent of the vote on his ballot in order to be inducted.
But Utley has already established himself as a potential Hall of Famer by accumulating 28.8 percent and 39.8 percent of the vote in his first two years on the ballot. Who’s next after Utley knocks down the door?
“Over the years, you look at guys who are great players and why they haven’t gotten in it’s probably because their offense doesn’t stack up as a whole to the greats that are in there,” Kent said during a Zoom call with reporters Friday afternoon. “Some of my numbers don’t even stack up to the greats that are in there.”
While Kent’s 351 homers as a second baseman are the most all-time, he ranks 11th among Hall of Famers at the position with 2,461 hits, 12th with a .290 average and 19th with a Baseball-Reference WAR of 55.4.
By these measures, the players who would benefit most from Kent’s induction are fellow Era members candidates Bobby Grich, Willie Randolph and Lou Whitaker, all of whom were either retired or winding down by the time Kent made his big league debut in 1992.
Kent has more hits and a higher average than Grich, Randolph and Whitaker, though the latter trio all finished with a WAR between 65.9 and 75.1.
But Era ballots are notoriously stuffed, especially for players such as Grich, Randolph and Whitaker who could land within either the Modern Baseball Era (for players who constructed all or most of their career prior to 1980) or the Contemporary Era (for players since 1980). Some of their competition for ballot spots include Dwight Evans, Keith Hernandez, Graig Nettles, Luis Tiant, Tommy John, David Cone…and maybe Pete Rose, which is a thorny mess for another time.
Grich, Randolph and Whitaker also all went one-and-done on the writer’s ballot back in the days before WAR was an accepted Hall of Fame metric. Kent had far more success remaining in the conversation on the writer’s ballot, where he peaked at 46.5 percent of the vote in his final year of eligibility in 2023.
And he made it to the contemporary era ballot in the same year as the PED-stained Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Gary Sheffield, all of whom have about as much chance of being elected as anyone reading these words.
Speaking of PED stains, Robinson Cano, who was on pace to finish with 3,000 hits and a .300 average before he got busted twice for PEDs, will go one-and-done in 2028, by which time Utley will likely be in the Hall of Fame as the first example of a second baseman elected for his peak and not his counting numbers. Utley has a 64.6 WAR but just 1,885 hits, which would be the eighth-fewest hits for any player in Cooperstown.
Amongst active second basemen, Jose Altuve has the numbers (a .303 average with 2,455 hits and 53.4 WAR) for election, though he has to hurdle any fallout from his role on the sign-stealing 2017 Houston Astros. But the election of Beltran, the only Astros player punished for his role in the scheme, is a good sign for Altuve, who is signed through 2029 and unlikely to appear on a ballot before the mid-2030s.
There may be a sizable gap before and after Altuve. New York Mets second baseman Marcus Semien has 48.8 WAR to go along with 1,675 hits, 262 homers and two Gold Gloves, but appears to be in steep decline at 35. The Arizona Diamondbacks’ Ketel Marte has 37.2 WAR at age 32 and is signed through 2030, though his peak has not yet generated much Cooperstown debate.
Dustin Pedroia, who played for the Boston Red Sox from 2006 through 2019, accumulated 51.8 WAR and batted .299 with 1,805 hits. He joined the ballot in 2025 and received 20.7 percent of the vote last year — an indication his candidacy will get a much closer look than those of Grich, Randolph and Whitaker, but also a reminder of how far Kent’s predecessors and successors at the keystone have to go between here and Cooperstown.
