Jeff Kent emotional ahead of going into Hall of Fame as Giant

It will have been almost two decades since Jeff Kent last donned a big-league uniform when he takes the stage next weekend in Cooperstown.He’s already getting emotional.“I had accepted that it just wasn’t going to happen,” Kent said Friday morning on a conference call with reporters ahead of his induction to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.Now, as he puts the finishing touches on the speech he’ll deliver to a crowd of 10,000-plus, with 60 some of the game’s greatest living legends seated behind him, it’s really happening.“It’s a bigger emotional deal than I ever thought it was going to be,” the typically surly second baseman acknowledged.

“I still tear up talking about it.”Kent, who retired in 2008, was passed over by the Baseball Writers Association of America all 10 times he appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, never receiving more than 46.5% of the vote.His candidacy was given new life by the Contemporary Era committee, a 16-member panel that deemed his career worthy of being honored alongside Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones.On July 26, the trio will become baseball’s newest Hall of Famers. Kent, who slugged 175 of his 377 career home runs — the most by a second baseman — in six memorable seasons in San Francisco, will go in wearing a Giants cap on his plaque.Later this summer, he will have his No.

21 retired by the Giants in a ceremony at Oracle Park.Despite his place as one of the top slugging second basemen of his era, Kent had come to terms that he would never see any of this kind of recognition.But in the 30-minute call with reporters, he had to pause multiple times as his eyes welled up with tears.“I’m trying to figure out why,” Kent said of his suddenly vulnerable emotional state.

“Is it because of the game? Is it because I finally got in? Is it because I wasn’t there and now I’m in — that emotional roller coaster? Why? Why are my emotions so attached to this?”One possible reason: family.Baseball, Kent s...