Jeff Kent on His 2000 MVP: “I Felt Scared”

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Jeff Kent collected the best individual honor of his career alone.

“At the end of the year, you get to sit down,” Kent told World Baseball Network at the Hall of Fame golf outing, one day before his induction. “I decompressed at my ranch and got the award there when nobody was around. You just kind of get left alone.”

The public part came later, on Opening Day 2001 at Pacific Bell Park, standing between Dusty Baker and J.T. Snow with the hardware in his hands. Kent had hit .314 with 33 home runs and 125 RBI for the San Francisco Giants in 2000 and was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player.

What he remembers about the months that followed isn’t the celebration.

“I felt scared, in a sense”

Asked what his preparation looked like heading into the next spring training, Kent didn’t reach for a routine.

“I felt scared, in a sense,” he said. “Because you’re almost trying to repeat — or you set a standard, and you know, why can’t you do that again? So it was kind of scary going into spring training. Nervousness, probably.”

He was 33 years old, a decade into his career.

“That was the middle of my career too,” Kent said. “I’ve never really felt anxiety like that in the middle of my career, going in and trying to repeat what I had done.”

It took time to shake.

“It took me a little while to adjust and get over it. I don’t think I got off to a good start after that year,” he said. “But things settled down, because I was trying to do too much. This game — you can do too much in.”

Then the line that explains the whole answer: “I was trying to be better than my MVP year. That was too good of a year to try to be better.”

He recovered well enough. Two seasons later he homered 37 times to help carry the Giants to a National League pennant.

A long road to the ballot

Kent finished with 377 home runs as a second baseman, a new benchmark for the position, and eight seasons of 100 or more RBI — also the most ever at second base. He reached 20 home runs twelve times and was a five-time All-Star.

It still took him fifteen years to reach Cooperstown.

He spent a full decade on the Baseball Writers’ Association of America ballot without election, falling off after the 2023 vote. His case went to the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, which met in December 2025 and named him on 14 of 16 ballots — the only candidate on an eight-man slate to clear the 75 percent threshold.

The weekend itself

Kent described the days before the ceremony as a walk down memory lane — meeting players he’d watched, and shaking hands with men he’d spent a career trying to beat.

“It’s been pretty cool to see them and hug some of these guys that you competed against and wanted to kill,” he said. “And now they’re giving you hugs.”

Two of them were his classmates. Kent and Carlos Beltrán were teammates on the 2004 Houston Astros. Kent and Andruw Jones were teammates on the 2008 Los Angeles Dodgers — though Kent’s memory of Jones runs earlier than that, to the years Jones was patrolling center field in Atlanta.

“He was always running down my gappers out in the outfield with the Braves,” Kent said. “Especially in the playoffs.”

He had his children with him in the cart for the golf outing, which he said was more fun than trying to hit it straight.

Kent, Beltrán and Jones were enshrined Sunday, July 26, at the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown.