Jeff Hoffman and the Worst BABIP of All Time

In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.

Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”

Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake.

Baseball Reference doesn’t have Malone’s three games in its database, but it credits the 1872 Eckfords with 274 errors over 26 games, or a bit more than one per inning. Seven players, nearly a third of the roster, are credited with more errors than putouts. Even when the Eckfords weren’t kicking the ball around, they weren’t exactly flashing the leather either. (In their defense, the baseball glove had only been invented two years earlier.) They ran a BABIP of .408, second highest in the league. Malone finished his three complete games with an ERA of 11.33, but a FIP of just 3.99, slightly worse than the league average. In front of a decent defense, his three games might not have been particularly noteworthy, but alas.

Our database lists 37,893 pitchers who threw at least 20 innings in a single season, and Malone’s .560 BABIP ranks in first place (the bad first place). The third and fourth spots also belong to National Association pitchers, but today we’re going to talk about the pitcher in second place, who was not born before the Civil War, who never danced a quadrille, and who never had to worry about catching the measles (well, at least not until recently).

How did Jeff Hoffman end up on a list directly ahead of two people who died before the fall of the Ottoman Empire and right behind someone who pitched so long ago his time of death is unknown? Hoffman has a 6.26 ERA and Blue Jays fans are calling for his head, but he’s also got a 3.34 xERA, a 3.00 FIP, a 2.90 DRA, a 2.11 SIERA, and a 2.09 xFIP. That last number is the fifth best in baseball. His 36.4% strikeout rate ranks seventh. Pitching in front of the same defense, the electric Louis Varland, who usurped Hoffman’s closer spot, has a BABIP that’s 188 points lower than Hoffman’s.

I am legally obligated to begin and end this article with a discussion about variance and sample size, so let’s get that out of the way right now. Obviously, it’s early in the season, and Hoffman hasn’t pitched all that much. Things will smooth out. Even if he didn’t have the fifth-best xFIP in baseball, I wouldn’t expect him to keep running a 6.26 ERA. It’s worth writing about anyway because Hoffman’s BABIP is so extreme that it requires us to conjure the ghost of Martin Malone. OK, back to our question. What on Earth is happening when batters put the ball in play against Hoffman?

Recent Toronto teams have excelled defensively, but things have changed in 2026. During the offseason, the Blue Jays added poor defenders Kazuma Okamoto and Jesús Sánchez. Myles Straw is 31 now, and although he graded out as an elite defender as recently as last year, he’s right around average this season. Ernie Clement is a full-time second baseman now, and his defense has fallen off a cliff. He put up 4 FRV at second base last year, and he’s already at -2 this year. I wrote last week about Daulton Varsho’s defensive troubles. Nathan Lukes has also seen his defense take a step backward, from 5 FRV last year to 0 this year. Their defense has allowed a .295 BABIP, which ranks 25th this year.

To be clear, Toronto’s defense is still not a liability. The Jays are getting great performances from Platinum Glover Andrés Giménez at short and the combination of Alejandro Kirk, Brandon Valenzuela, and Tyler Heineman at catcher, but that’s about it. Put it all together, and the Blue Jays rank seventh with 11 FRV and 19th with 3 DRS. However, nearly all that value comes from the catcher spot, and that’s mostly about framing, blocking, and controlling the running game. It’s not about making plays in the field. Except for this one. This one is great, and Hoffman owes Valenzuela a thank-you note.

That said, Statcast lets us answer the question more specifically, as it breaks down the team’s OAA while each individual pitcher is on the mound. The Blue Jays are at -1 when Hoffman is on the mound, with a success rate added mark of -3%. That’s among the lower marks in the game, but you know who’s pitched in front of even worse defense? That damned Louis Varland is at -3 OAA with a success rate added of -4%. So let’s dig into how exactly this is happening.

Hoffman has allowed 30 groundballs this season. Among pitchers who’ve induced that many grounders, his .400 batting average allowed is the fourth highest in the league, even though the average exit velocity of those grounders is 84.3 mph, which ranks all the way down at 203rd, and his 27% hard-hit rate ranks 233rd. Let me show you what that looks like in a scatter plot.

We’d expect to see a trendline stretching from the bottom left to the top right. The more hard-hit balls you give up, the higher your batting average against will be. But it’s still early in the season, so lots of noise is obscuring that signal. Even so, Hoffman stands out way on the top left. His hard-hit rate is great, and his batting average against is one of the worst in the game. The 184-point gap between Hoffman’s .235 expected batting average on grounders and his .419 batting average is the largest in the game. How does that work?

A look at the spray chart makes it seem like it’s the fault of new third baseman Okamoto, and it’s true that a couple of stoppable balls have gotten through him. Unfortunately for Hoffman, both of these balls came with runners in scoring position. They also came in the same inning.

Aside from these two plays, though, a lot of Hoffman’s groundball hits just seem to have been hit at the exact right spot. In the clips below, you’ll see a squibber that caused a rushed throw, one weak chopper to third when the third baseman was shifted over toward second base, a weak line drive through the shortstop position when the shortstop was shifted all the way over toward second, and a few seeing-eye singles up the middle.

A few got by the stellar Giménez, but a few more have gone past the newly struggling Clement. Lastly, as Michael Baumann wrote back in 2022, the turf at the Rogers Centre plays very fast, allowing more balls to sneak through the infield. Hoffman has also given up some normal hard-hit singles up the middle, but between Okamoto’s two whiffs and that supercut, we’re at seven hard-luck hits that added 233 points to Hoffman’s BABIP on grounders. Oh, and that’s not counting, uh, whatever this is.

Make that 267 points. Some of that’s bad luck. Some of it’s bad defense. But either way, it’s altogether too much bad. Luckily for Hoffman, batted balls don’t just come in groundball flavor. What about fly balls and line drives?

Yeah, they’ve gone much worse. Hoffman’s .742 batting average allowed on air balls is the worst in baseball by 129 points! Once again, the difference between his expected and actual batting average is the highest in baseball. Once again, it seems like bad luck, because his 91.2-mph average exit velocity on balls in the air ranks 258th and his 41% hard-hit rate ranks 263rd. Remember that first scatter plot I showed you, where Hoffman was the unlucky guy in the top left corner? This is something different. He’s cursed. He’s in his own galaxy. He’s alone in the void of space screaming silent screams.

How does that work? I watched every air base hit has Hoffman allowed this year, and I found four plays that really hurt him.

The misplays here are particularly ugly, but I don’t think anyone would expect all four of these balls to be caught. We’re probably looking at two or three more base hits than Hoffman deserved (plus some extra bases due to the misplays). The problem is that Hoffman has allowed only 31 air balls this season, meaning those plays added somewhere between 60 and 100 points to his BABIP. However, at this point, we need to go to the spray chart, because we can’t pin everything on the defense.

Hoffman’s xwOBACON, his expected wOBA on batted balls, is .428, one of the worst marks in the league. He’s gotten unlucky, but he’s also allowed four home runs, and his 29% line drive rate is one of the highest in baseball. His xwOBA is still fantastic because he strikes so many people out, and he really is getting unlucky on a lot of batted balls, but that’s not all that’s going on. The spray chart shows why that matters. Look at all those orange singles that have fallen in front of the outfielders. And we can get even more specific.

See those four hits I circled in left field? All four came when right-handed batters turned on Hoffman’s fastball and sent it down the line for a single. See those eight I circled in right field? Six came when lefties turned on Hoffman’s splitter, and two came on his slider. Only four of these 12 balls qualified as hard-hit, but they were still line drives hit in the donut hole between the infield and outfield that is death to a pitcher’s BABIP. Hoffman is getting unlucky, but he’s also getting hit in very specific ways that have a lot less to do with luck and a lot more to do with the way his pitches are playing.

Allowing so many home runs is definitely not ideal; you’d definitely prefer Varland’s 60% groundball rate and zero home runs. But if giving up home runs was the only thing going on here, Hoffman would be just fine. He’s still striking out the world, and on their own, four home runs and 12 paper cuts wouldn’t make much of a difference. But combine them with bad sequencing and 12 more paper cuts due to iffy defense or batted ball luck, and Hoffman is bleeding to death.

As with any story about BABIP, the small sample is a huge culprit here. Hoffman is a single-inning reliever and we’re barely two months into the season. We’ve documented 12 balls that didn’t bounce his way, and that’s a huge share of the 69 total batted balls he’s allowed this season. Every year, someone’s got to be the luckiest and someone’s got to be the unluckiest. But it’s not every year that the unluckiest someone pulls Martin Malone back into the conversation.