Jeff Kent thought it was a spam call. It was Johnny Bench

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Jeff Kent isn’t a fan of spam calls, so he doesn’t typically pick up when an unknown number flashes on his phone screen. One day, on a whim, he decided to let one through.

“I had my phone in my hand, and this phone number came up,” Kent said. “I said, ‘You know what? I haven’t talked to a robo-caller in a while. I'll take this call.’”

Kent wasn’t expecting to hear a real person on the other end of the line -- much less a fellow Hall of Famer.

“Hello?” Kent answered.

“Jeff,” the caller replied.

“Yeah.”

“Jeff, this is Johnny Bench.”

Kent, 57, received a deluge of congratulatory messages after he was voted into the Hall of Fame via the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee in December, but he said the call from Bench left him stunned.

“I literally fell back in my chair,” Kent said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Kent has spent the last couple of months in a state of disbelief, as the former Giants second baseman is still grappling with the emotions of his long-awaited election to Cooperstown. He’s been overwhelmed by the sudden avalanche of accolades, including the Giants’ plans to retire his No. 21 during a special ceremony at Oracle Park on Aug. 29.

“It's hard for me to give you an adjective that describes it,” said Kent, who was invited to serve as a guest instructor at Giants Spring Training this year. “It's not cool. It's not neat. It's not great. It's not surreal. There is no word yet that I've been able to find. … I'm still searching for that, because I am overwhelmed.

“It does bring tears to my eyes. It's been emotional. It's been great. In the game, you play with a little bit of arrogance and cockiness. I've used the word lightly, but you play it also with a little bit of hate. Hate to lose. Hate to fail. Hate to strike out. You hate a lot of things in the game, and I don't have any hate anymore. You're trying to grab onto something, and I think that's where the emotion comes in.”

Kent won’t be speechless for long. He said he’s already started working on the address he’ll give when he’s officially enshrined at Cooperstown alongside Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones on July 26. He described his initial drafts as “too mechanical,” so he wants to weave in more stories and take cues from other Hall of Fame speeches he’s been studying.

“I’m trying to get a feel because the one thing you don’t want to do is piss off all the guys that are sitting behind you when you’re talking,” Kent said. “Because you’ll start to hear them ripping on you, I’ve heard. ‘End this, let’s go, I’m sweating down here. Let’s get out of here.’ That’s probably where I’m going to be most nervous. Talking to the fans, not so much. The people behind you, probably.”

Kent is planning to be at Giants camp through Tuesday. He knows he probably won’t have enough time to get into the nitty-gritty of hitting with players, but he said he’ll be happy to offer tips on how to turn better double plays if other infielders seek him out for advice. Once his time in Scottsdale is up, Kent plans to head to Tampa, Fla., to visit his son Kaeden, a 22-year-old infielder who was a third-round Draft pick of the Yankees last year and ranks as their No. 12 prospect.

Kaeden was a sophomore at Texas A&M when the Aggies lost the 2024 College World Series to the University of Tennessee, which was coached by Tony Vitello at the time. Kent joked that he’s disliked the Giants’ new manager since then, though he also revealed that he briefly considered having Kaeden transfer to Tennessee to try to get him more playing time as an underclassman.

“Tony kind of rebuilt that program at Tennessee,” Kent said. “Tennessee was kind of dead in the dumps. They got Tony, and he kind of rebuilt them. I was impressed with what he did. I watched his passion on the field. I watched how he treated his players and how he backed his players. I wanted that for my own kid, too.”