The fateful slider that Miguel Rojas hooked over the left-field wall for a game-tying homer stuck with Jeff Hoffman for a long time over the winter. In the excruciating moments afterwards, as he and the Toronto Blue Jays struggled to process a gutting 5-4, 11-inning loss in Game 7 of the World Series, Hoffman blamed himself.
“I cost everybody in here a World Series ring,” he said. Once home, replays of the moment followed him “everywhere.”
“I didn’t have to replay it in my mind,” he said.
He believes it was the right pitch call for that 3-2 count, would throw it again in the same situation “and nail the pitch nine out of 10 times.” But, in that ninth inning of Game 7, “it spun on me and, yeah, it wasn’t good.”
“It’s my job,” Hoffman said during a recent 25-minute interview on a quiet spring morning at the Player Development Complex. “When I come in, the game is supposed to be over. Obviously, it stings more when it’s in a spot like that, but it stings all through the year. There were a lot of times last year I felt the same exact (responsibility). Maybe I didn’t vocalize it post-game or whatever. But when I come into the game, that’s what they pay me to do, to shut it down and to make sure we walk out of there with a win. When you don’t do it, I take those chips and I don’t take them lightly. I carry them with me and it drives you to be better the next time out. It just comes with the job.”
It’s a job Hoffman still wants, along with all that comes with it, and it’s a role he’s been told he will have again this season, when the Blue Jays try to make up the narrow margin that cost them their first championship since 1993.
Anointed closer for the first time last season, the 33-year-old led the majors with 59 games finished and placed fourth with 33 saves while appearing in a career-high 71 games and logging 68 innings, his most as a reliever. He also blew seven save opportunities and, glaringly, gave up 15 home runs, six more than he did combined during brilliant 2023 and 2024 seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies.
In the post-season, he was dominant, allowing only two runs in 12.1 innings over 10 games. One of those runs was meaningless in the 5-2 win that clinched the American League Division Series over the New York Yankees — the other came on the Rojas homer. Even with the bitter final outing, he “loved” being a closer.
“Obviously the good times are the highest of the highs, and the bad times are lowest of the lows,” said Hoffman. “It didn’t surprise me that’s the way it was — I just didn’t perform the way I wanted a lot of the season. I got more comfortable and I think that showed in the post-season when I was able to turn it back on and do what I had to do through the majority of the post-season. That season will teach me a lot moving forward and I’ll be a better pitcher for us this year.”
During his entrance meeting this spring, manager John Schneider told him that “we’re going to do the same thing that we did last year, I’m going to get the ball at the end of the game,” Hoffman said.
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That wasn’t a given heading into the off-season. The Blue Jays, to varying degrees, pursued a number of free-agent closers — Edwin Diaz, Ryan Helsley, Raisel Iglesias and Emilio Pagan among them — before eventually landing set-up man Tyler Rogers.
General manager Ross Atkins scoured the market with Hoffman’s blessing.
“I got a lot of calls from Ross about guys that we were targeting and what I thought about certain avenues we could go down and it was just very relieving to know that we were in on so many guys,” Hoffman said.
“My message to Ross was like, ‘If it’s going to help us win, then yes, do it, no matter what the guy is, no matter what his role is going to be coming in.’ We didn’t necessarily end up getting one of those established closers that have been doing it for a long time, but we got a really, really good one in Tyler and a guy that can pitch in so many different ways for us. You pair that with guys like Louis (Varland), Yimi (Garcia) when he’s back healthy, guys like (Mason) Fluharty and (Braydon) Fisher, who are just going to get better after the experiences they’ve gone through, and we have a good group. I’m really excited.”
Contributing to that excitement is the way Hoffman intends to attack this season.
As part of his spring entrance meeting, he and the Blue Jays discussed his pitch usage and ways to adapt. Over the past three seasons, his fastball and splitter percentages have gone up at the expense of his slider, which went from 47.9 per cent in 2023, to 40.8 per cent in 2024 to 29.9 per cent last year. The thinking now is to scale back use of the heater to more effectively blend the other two offerings.
The slider, at 47.4 per cent of swings, and splitter, at 31.8 per cent, “get a lot more whiff,” compared to the fastball at 24.2 per cent, which is also the pitch on which he took the most damage. Ten of his 15 homers came against the fastball, leading to an outlier season in that regard that he and the Blue Jays spent a lot of time studying.
“I think sometimes my aggressiveness in the zone can get me,” said Hoffman. “Through the season, we realized what was happening and I started to try to take care of some of those pitches a little bit better. Whether it was throwing a ball on purpose or making sure that if I was trying to throw a strike, it was going to be the perfect strike or it was going to miss and I wasn’t going to get hurt by it. That was definitely part of my learning curve being a first-year closer full-time. … We’ll be able to combat that this year and it won’t happen again.”
Hoffman plans to use the spring to test out some grip adjustments on his splitter to “see if there’s anything there that can optimize it,” so it’s even more deceptive to left-handed hitters, with less horizontal and more vertical break.
Lastly, the Blue Jays are aiming to be more strategic about his usage so that he’s pitching more consistently without some of the bigger swings from last year, when he pitched on back-to-back days 22 times but also nine times on three days of rest, four times on four days of rest and five times on six days of rest.
“I’m not going to have five days off in a row because we’re blowing teams out or scores aren’t close,” said Hoffman. “We’re going to do a better job of getting me in there in non-save situations and allowing me to stay fresh from a pitching standpoint and knowing what my stuff is going do and being able to feel the ball with a batter in the box, not just throwing bullpen sessions and all that.”
Combined, all the adjustments are aimed at building upon a 2025 season that for Hoffman will forever be marked by that one slider to Rojas.
All those feelings from Game 7 didn’t begin to fade for him until a few weeks later, once he resumed working out and had something different to focus on. He’s able to look back now while also casting an eye on what it all means moving forward.
“We had all these moments throughout that series, like the Bo (Bichette) homer in Game 7, that should be a moment immortalized and capped off with a trophy. I had the opportunity to shut it down and just didn’t happen. You still see stuff on the media about that game and it brings back good and bad memories. You never know if you’re going to get that close again. It took me parts of 10 seasons to get to a World Series, been on some pretty good teams and it just doesn’t happen. You have to be really good and really lucky and it just didn’t happen for us last year. There’s a lot of what could I have done better, what could I have changed? Just thinking about that kind of stuff,” Hoffman said.
“In a perfect world, I would have loved to go out and had my best year as a Blue Jay in Year 1 and really excelled and did everything above and beyond that that I had in my head. It didn’t happen that way. Went through some growing pains. But I’m a learner and I’m super-competitive and I’m looking forward to get another crack at it.
“And I think this year is going to go a lot different than it did last year.”
