Bill James is apparently not too impressed by Jeff Kent. In the Postscript to the 2003 edition of the New Historical Baseball Abstract, written after the 2002 season, Bill said, “I looked carefully at the issue of whether Jeff Kent had a good argument to be considered one of the top 20 second basemen of all time, and concluded that he did not, and would not, even setting aside the argument that we should be careful in rating active players. If he has another MVP-candidate season, however, he will be near the top 20.”

A few days ago, on his website, somebody asked him whether he would vote for Kent as a Hall of Famer. Bill replied, “Probably not.   I haven’t studied it, but Kent seems schematically to score as a better player than he would seem to be intuitively.    I’ll study it before I take any firm stance, but. . . .I wouldn’t vote for him if he rattles the bar on the way over.”

Joe Posnanski was in a similar boat. He recently wrote on his blog, “I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, when someone says, ‘Jeff Kent,’ well, I don’t think ‘Hall of Famer.’” But after studying the numbers, Posnanski changed his tune. Actually, the title of his blog post was, “Why We Need Numbers.”

Rob Neyer didn’t have such a negative immediate reaction to Kent and the Hall, declaring that Kent had, for him, passed the “sniff test.”

Is Jeff Kent a Hall of Famer? Either way, where does he now rank among the greatest second basemen of all time? Having looked at the issue a few different ways, I’m pretty confident that 1) Kent is, in fact, a Hall of Fame-caliber player, and 2) Kent is probably the 13th greatest second baseman in baseball history.

There are 17 post-1900 Hall of Famers who can be classified as second basemen. Of those 17, four (in alphabetical order: Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, Joe Morgan, and Rogers Hornsby) are clearly in a class by themselves. After that quartet, five more players are a notch below, but are still obvious Hall of Famers (Rod Carew, Frankie Frisch, Charlie Gehringer, Jackie Robinson, and Ryne Sandberg). All of the top nine second basemen were elected by the BBWAA.

Another half-dozen players were very good, though their Hall of Fame cases are more questionable (Bobby Doerr, Johnny Evers, Nellie Fox, Joe Gordon, Billy Herman, and Tony Lazzeri). After that you have Red Schoendienst and Bill Mazeroski, both fine players, but both below-average Hall of Famers. Each one of these bottom-feeders was a Veterans Committee choice.

I decided to use Win Shares Above Bench (WSAB, from The Hardball Times) to look at the best second basemen in baseball history. I took Bill James’ top 25 second basemen in the New Historical Baseball Abstract, plus Schoendienst, Mazeroski, and Kent. For each, I looked at their total career WSAB, their top five WSAB seasons, and their next five best years. I put these together to come up with a very simple score:

Career WSAB +

(Top 5 WSAB * 2) +

Next 5 WSAB

Basically, this gives bonus points for prime seasons, and extra bonus points for peak years. Oh, and Lajoie gets shorted some points, since I’ve only got WSAB numbers from 1900 on, and he played a few years in the 19th century.

Here are the results, ranked 1 through 28:

As you can see, there’s a gray area between the Billy Herman group and the Jackie Robinson group, a gray area that includes such sabermetric darlings as Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker, and underappreciated Dead Ball Era star Larry Doyle. Willie Randolph also has basically the same credentials as all the second-class Hall of Fame second basemen.

300 points seems to be the dividing line: below that number, and you’ve got essentially  no chance of making the Hall. Kent, at 401, is well ahead of the marginal Hall of Fame group, but not quite as good as the shoo-ins.

Of course, you might reasonably quibble with the actual Hall of Fame list... What about the Hall of Merit? 

Actually, that’s not much different. The Hall of Merit voters traded Evers, Fox, Lazzeri, Schoendienst, and Mazeroski for Grich, Whitaker, and Randolph, but the end result is basically the same: Kent is clearly a middle-of-the-pack immortal. (And so, incidentally, is Larry Doyle.)

A few other notes before we move on: Kent isn’t just 13th on the above list. He ranks tied for 12th in total WSAB; 12th in his top five seasons; and 8th in his next five. Just looking at offense, he’s 13th in Offensive Winning Percentage and 7th in Batting Runs. Pick your measurement; Kent is safely in the top 20, and he’s pretty clearly one of the 15 or so best second basemen ever.

Whether that makes Kent a Hall of Famer is, I suppose, up to individual interpretation. I mean, if you’re a small-Hall kind of person, then you probably want to draw the line at Frisch, with a special pass for Jackie. But Kent has stronger credentials than loads of already-enshrined second basemen. If you buy the idea that the Hall is a self-defining institution, then I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that Jeff Kent – and Grich, and Doyle, and Whitaker – belong.