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Hot Corner Harbor: The Veterans Committee Elects Jeff Kent to the Hall of Fame, But Some Other Confusing Stuff Happened Too

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

On Sunday, we got our first official Hall of Fame announcement for the Class of 2026, with the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Era panel revealing the results of their election. And somehow, the results were both very predictable and rather baffling. But first, we’ll start with the big headline: Jeff Kent will be joining the Hall of Fame in 2026.​
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​I wrote several​pieces previewing​this election (thank you to everyone who read them!), and if you read those, this is in some ways unsurprising. I more or less began that mini-series by saying “I believe that Jeff Kent is the most likely Veterans Committee inductee this voting cycle, and probably the only one I would place above 50/50 odds”, and finished it by saying “If you want that broken down to ‘which outcomes are the most likely’, it probably comes out to ‘only Kent gets in’”. Those are both direct quotes, by the way; good job, past me!
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If you’d like a fuller accounting of his career, I’ve done a longer write-up of the merits of his case before. The short version of it is that Kent was a big power hitter at a position that normally isn’t home to power hitters, and he racked up some impressive totals as a result. His 377 home runs are the most ever for a second baseman, blowing by Rogers Hornsby’s seven-decade old record of 301, and he looks set to stay at the top for some time still. His 1518 RBI make him one of just three second basemen to pass 1500, along with Nap Lajoie and Hornsby again. And despite a bit of a delayed start to his career, he still managed nearly 2500 hits, too.
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(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs unless otherwise stated, by the way.)
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