Godspeed, Jeff Kent

Surly and uncooperative. Possibly prone to prevarication. Less than a perfect teammate. These are all charges that were leveled against Jeff Kent during his career, and some of them were not without evidentiary merit. Still, I loved him. He was my favorite Met player from 1992-96, and I followed his subsequent career with somewhat more interest than other ex-Mets who had been similarly traded away.

Jeff came to New York midway through his rookie season, which had begun in the American League with the Toronto Blue Jays. He was (along with outfielder Ryan Thompson) the haul we got for star pitcher David Cone when it became apparent that a trade must be consummated. And, as Mets trades go, this was actually one of the better ones--much better than when we traded Kent away in 1996, along with shortstop Jose Vizcaino, for Carlos Baerga in decline and the last gasp of Alvaro Espinoza. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It has been widely assumed that Jeff Kent only "became" Jeff Kent (the potential Hall-of-Famer) after he had been traded away from the Mets--this is only partially true. While the best was certainly yet to come, Jeff was not exactly a packet of olive loaf while he was in New York.

According to the measures used at the NY Mets Hall of Records, Jeff was the third-best hitter on the team in his first full season (behind Bobby Bonilla and Eddie Murray) while fielding a much more demanding position. The next year he was even more important, ranking only behind Bonilla, and leading the club in hits, doubles, triples, RBI, and batting average. In 1995 he was once again the third-highest ranked batsman, trailing only Bonilla and Rico Brogna.

In fact, if it had not been for the players' strike that wiped out the end of the 1994 season and lasted into the beginning of '95, it is very likely that Kent would have had three consecutive seasons with more than 20 home runs as a second baseman--something that no other Met second sacker has ever accomplished.

Some of the Met fans of that era booed him anyway. (Should we be surprised?) They saw him as a sulking, angry young man who was only concerned with himself. What I saw was someone who hated to fail, who hated to lose. Granted, my vantage point was not the locker room or even the stands at Shea--it was only through my TV screen that I saw every moment I witnessed of Jeff Kent's Met career. (I remember one time when Jeff pushed away a TV camera that was trying to catch him close up returning to the dugout, and I was thrilled. What passion! What fire! Undoubtedly the camera man had another opinion.)

In any case, he was gone midway through 1996 in the trade mentioned above, then traded (again with Jose Vizcaino) to the Giants following the season. The rest, as they say, was history.

Five years from now, Jeff Kent will be on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time, and while he won't be elected on the first ballot, it won't take him nearly as long as Jim Rice. Brilliant writers like Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski have already eloquently stated his case for Cooperstown, so I won't cover that ground again.

But when I visit the Coop again someday in ten or twelve years, I'll be certain to search for Jeff's plaque, and even though he'll probably be wearing a cap with a bronze "SF" engraved upon it, I'll know that he was really one of ours. Jeff Kent was a Met.