Yankees prospect Kaeden Kent has baseball in his DNA, thanks for Hall of Fame dad Jeff Kent

Yankees prospect Kaeden Kent always has had “this fever for baseball.”

Just ask his dad.

“When I was playing, my wife [Dana] could not stop the kid from talking about baseball,” soon-to-be-inducted Baseball Hall of Famer Jeff Kent told Newsday in a recent phone interview.

“He would sit in his car seat, and my wife would take him to ballgames and stuff. He would sit in the back and he would chant, ‘Batter, batter, batter, batter, batter, swing batter!’ He wouldn't stop. My wife would take him into the kids club or the hallways in the tunnels when they were waiting for me, and he'd always have a bat in his hand – a plastic bat because he always was swinging it. We could never give him a real bat because he’d hurt somebody, so we'd always have him with a foam bat.

“My wife would have to stick her hand out with a ball on it and pretend like it was a tee, and he'd be hitting balls off her hand. She would tell me: ‘This kid's nuts. He's a nut. He can't stop.’

“And the reason why I say that is because he was way different than my other three kids, and they grew up in the game too. He just had it young, and it's not something you teach him. He just had it.”

Kaeden – the Yankees’ No. 13 prospect, according to MLB.com, and their third-round draft pick out of Texas A&M last year – has shined in his first full season in professional baseball. Entering Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop owned a .297/.353/.426 slash line with four homers, 22 extra-base hits, 30 RBIs and 16 stolen bases in 59 games with High-A Hudson Valley. He is living out a journey that has “always been my dream,” and his dad has been there every step of the way.

“He's made me the player that I am now,” Kaeden told Newsday. “Growing up, I have two brothers and a sister, and he was a great father figure and a great mentor – in not only baseball. But on the baseball side, he's been my coach my whole life, and I still rely on him now. What a blessing it is to have somebody like that to talk baseball about and to bounce ideas off of and to get a different perspective from.”

Kaeden, from Austin, Texas, was only 5 when his dad retired after a 17-year MLB career. Jeff swore he wouldn’t become a Little League coach for his kids upon retiring, but – after realizing there had to be a better way to train them – he did. Jeff began coaching Kaeden’s older brothers, Hunter and Colton, and young Kaeden was a bat boy on the team.

Jeff coached Kaeden from when he was 10 until he was a junior in high school.

“I've been his coach, and then I was just a fan, and I'm his dad. But all in all, I've really realized – and I've stuck to this the best that I can – is I don't want to live through my kid,” Jeff said. “I try really hard to not have him be like me, but I try to teach him the basics. I've tried to teach him all the mistakes and all the weaknesses that I had when I was a player, so he's better prepared when he needs to recall those moments.”

Some of that advice?

“It's just a tough game, so he just encourages me to stick with it and to understand that every day you need to find a way to get better,” Kaeden said. “When you take a break, the game will pass you by. When you stop learning, the game's going to pass you by. So every day you come out here and you try to learn and you try to grow, and eventually one day you'll look up and hopefully you'll be where you've always dreamed of being.”

When asked to describe his game, Kaeden said he tries to win every game and every pitch and is “never out of the fight.” He primarily has played shortstop – a position that the Yankees’ No. 1 prospect George Lombard Jr. has held down with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre – but also is getting reps at second base (18 starts this season) and third (four). He credited the Yankees’ organization in many ways, including their emphasis on mastering those three infield positions.

For his career, Jeff – primarily a second baseman – had a .290/.356/.500 slash line with 2,461 hits, 377 homers and 1,518 RBIs. The MLB.com scouting report on the 6-2, 200-pound Kaeden said that he “has the same profile as an offensive-minded infielder who fits best at second base.”

Does Jeff see any similarities in their games?

“His personality has got a lot of his mother in him, but he's still got a lot of prickiness like me,” Jeff said. “And most great athletes, I think, have this edge to them. And he's got that edge, but he's a way better teammate than me and he's not as feisty as I was. Physically, he's bigger than me … probably not a whole lot (of similarities).”

Jeff noted that Kaeden is learning a different type of baseball than he did, one that is “not emotionally driven, but it's driven by production.” He said he’s handled the ups and downs of the minors – including the wait for a promotion and not getting emotionally caught up in good or bad performances – well.

“You always take pride in watching your offspring do what you did and succeed at it,” Jeff said. “... For me, baseball has always been a business. It was when I played. It was when Kaeden was in the house, and it kind of is now.

“I try to keep Kaeden somewhat on an emotional stable level. But he's had some great moments, and some of those moments have been awesome to watch.”