Jeff Hoffman Joins the Jays

The Blue Jays came into this offseason with one glaring need: relievers. Now, that’s not to say that they don’t need help elsewhere. The bottom of their lineup is thin. They’re probably a starter short of an optimal rotation, particularly given how uncertain Alek Manoah’s future looks. But they’re a playoff hopeful, and they had the worst bullpen in baseball in 2024 – 3.1 wins worse than the White Sox, if you can believe it. So the bullpen had to be priority number one, and voila:
OFFICIAL: We’ve signed All-Star RHP Jeff Hoffman to a 3-year deal ??
Welcome Back, @Hoff_23! pic.twitter.com/A1tN8zOGjV
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) January 11, 2025
Jeff Hoffman might not be a household name, but he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball since joining the Phillies in 2023. He’s racked up 3.6 WAR in that time, but reliever WAR can get weird with the leverage adjustments, so let’s put it this way instead: He’s sixth in ERA and third in FIP over the last two years. His strikeout rate hovers around 33.3%, and he walks a thoroughly normal number of hitters. In other words, this doesn’t look like a fluke, and he’s not getting paid like a fluke, either. His deal is worth $33 million over those three years, with $6 million in available incentives.
In Philadelphia, Hoffman was part of a dominant ensemble. The Phillies have had one of the best bullpens in the league each of the last two years, often going six deep with impact arms. Toronto – well, Toronto has had 15 different pitchers accrue negative wins above replacement. Hoffman is coming in as the clear best arm in the group, a completely different situation than he’s faced in recent years.
To the Jays’ credit, they didn’t just slap Hoffman on an otherwise-unchanged bullpen and call it a day. After trading last year’s best reliever, Yimi García, at the deadline, they re-signed him earlier this offseason. When they traded for Andrés Giménez in December, they secured Nick Sandlin as a throw-in. Those three will all feature towards the top of the ‘pen, hopefully soaking up innings that would have otherwise gone to meaningfully worse arms.
It’s an interesting way to build a bullpen, though one that feels born more out of necessity than desire. The best way to get a great reliever like Hoffman is to do it before he’s great. That’s what the Phillies did when they signed him off of waivers in 2023; the Reds had released him, as had the Twins, and Philadelphia profited. It’s so hard to predict which relievers will pan out – volatile pitchers, small sample sizes, and injury risk make for a difficult guessing game. If everyone had their druthers, they’d keep a constantly percolating pot of reliever maybes and make hay with the ones who pan out. You see this every year with the Phillies, Dodgers, Rays, and Brewers. But a one-year makeover? The Jays had to have a headliner, and Hoffman seems like a good option for it.
I wouldn’t quite call Hoffman’s arsenal classic, but you’ve seen pitchers who at least strongly resemble him before. He throws a four-seamer in the upper 90s with solid vertical movement and explosive arm-side break. He complements that fastball with a sharp, mid-80s slider. He misses an outrageous number of bats with those two pitches, a solid sinker, and a nasty splitter. Pitch-level models think everything he throws is spectacular. This isn’t a case where some lesser pitcher BABIP’ed and misdirection’ed his way into a year of good stats; Hoffman has clearly been the real deal of late.
From that standpoint, I think that this signing is great. The Jays had a specific need, and they got one of the best pitchers available to start patching things up. I preferred Tanner Scott and Blake Treinen among free agent relievers, but only by a hair, and I think Treinen was always headed back to the Dodgers. In other words, the Jays are shopping at the top of the market here, and that’s definitely a good idea given the depths of their bullpen dysfunction last year and their postseason aspirations in the upcoming season.
Now for the downsides. Hoffman was reportedly looking for a deal that valued him like a starter, the Reynaldo López/Jordan Hicks plan. In fact, his Jays contract makes some nods in that direction — each year has $2 million in incentives for pitching 90 innings (staggered as $500,000 for 60, 70, 80, and 90 frames) — but no one’s treating it that way. GM Ross Atkins said that the team is “excited to add Jeff to our bullpen” and that Hoffman “will get an opportunity to close games for us.”
Their bullpen shortcomings mean that Toronto was surely most interested in Hoffman as a reliever all along, but given that starters are more highly compensated than relievers in free agency, you might expect other teams to make larger offers to him for a starting role. In fact, Hoffman and the Orioles reportedly reached a three-year, $40 million deal that fell through thanks to concerns over his physical. It didn’t appear to be a huge disagreement – the Orioles continued to negotiate with revised terms – but I surmise that teams might be skeptical Hoffman can hold up to the rigors of full-time starting.
There will surely always be some risk there. But honestly, I think that’s mostly to the good for Toronto. If teams thought Hoffman could hack it as a starter, he probably wouldn’t be available for three years at $11 million per year, a bargain rate for an elite reliever. Every reliever is an injury risk, and I’m skeptical that teams are so good at anticipating injuries that they can meaningfully distinguish between the different risks associated with otherwise-healthy players; Hoffman didn’t hit the IL at all with the Phillies for whatever that’s worth.
The bigger risk? It’s that relievers who pop up out of nowhere sometimes vanish just as quickly. Last year’s Jeff Hoffman was Bryan Abreu, who went from replacement level (0.2 WAR from 2019-21) to elite (2.9 in 2022 and 2023) as an ensemble member of a great bullpen. He was still effective but hardly elite in 2024. Or maybe it was Matt Moore, who like Hoffman was over 30 when he posted two straight good years – he was abysmal in 2024, got injured, and may be out of baseball.
The year before, Collin McHugh felt like a similarly obvious top reliever and reclamation project, coming off of a two-year stretch with a 2.09 ERA, 2.43 FIP, and 3.2 WAR over 133 innings. He promptly declined, got hurt, and retired from baseball (though to be fair, he signed a free agent deal after the first year of his torrid stretch and was a bargain in free agency even considering his downward trajectory). You could throw Giovanny Gallegos or Ryan Tepera (elite in 2020 and 2021) into the mix. Sometimes relievers who flash out of nowhere return from whence they came.
That’s the risk of long deals for relievers, and that third year of Hoffman’s contract feels dicey to me. But honestly, I’d make this signing too if I were the Jays, and I wouldn’t feel even a little bit bad about it.
The 2025 season is the year for the Jays. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette are set to hit free agency this coming winter. Toronto has disappointed relative to expectations in its Sons of Stars era. This is the team’s last chance to deliver the kind of results that felt likely when Guerrero, Bichette, and Cavan Biggio hit the majors together. And while there’s always something that needs fixing, this bullpen was a huge something, and it needed fixing badly.
That’s how I’m looking at this deal – a necessary patch to a clearly deficient unit. This isn’t the way I’d build a team if I got to start from scratch. I’m as sold on Hoffman as I am on any reliever coming off of two spectacular seasons, which is to say that I’m skeptical but hopeful he’ll be excellent in the short term. But that third year of his deal? It’s the distant future as far as the Jays are concerned. It’s time to play for the present. Could Hoffman get hurt or regress towards average? Obviously. But could the Jays make a more meaningful improvement for a similar financial commitment? I doubt it. This feels to me like a great fit between a team desperate to compete in 2025 and a reliever whose present feels more enticing than his long-term future.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Twitter @_Ben_Clemens.
Apparently the Braves did not like Hoffman’s medicals either.