TORONTO -- The Blue Jays have removed Jeff Hoffman from the closer’s role, pivoting to a committee approach while he resets.
Hoffman has found himself as the next day’s lead topic of conversation too many times this season for a closer, which began to snowball over the past week-plus across the Blue Jays’ road trip against the Brewers, Diamondbacks and Angels.
The Blue Jays used Thursday’s off-day to sit down with Hoffman and plot out how this is going to work moving forward. This isn’t where anyone wants to be, particularly after the Blue Jays stuck with Hoffman as their closer throughout the offseason, but the Blue Jays hope that this short-term plan leads to more stability in the future.
“In the short term, we are going to share that [closing] responsibility," general manager Ross Atkins said Friday. "[Hoffman’s] still going to be getting very important outs for us, and I very much believe in him as a weapon for us.”
In the meantime, get ready for plenty of Louis Varland, who has been one of the best relievers in baseball through the first month of the season. The Blue Jays need Varland in the most important spots of every ballgame he’s available for. On nights that he comes in earlier than the ninth inning, we could see Tyler Rogers, Mason Fluharty or the underrated Braydon Fisher in the ninth. This will be more about matchups than classic, rigid roles for the time being.
The big picture here with Hoffman is a 7.59 ERA, which clearly doesn’t work in the ninth inning, but there are so many layers to this Hoffman conversation.
Yes, this stretches back to Game 7 of the World Series, where Hoffman gave up the game-tying home run to Miguel Rojas in the ninth inning. Prior to that in the postseason, Hoffman had given the Blue Jays 11 innings of one-run ball with 16 strikeouts, but it’s still understandable that Blue Jays fans -- who doubled and tripled in number across Canada in 2025 -- remember that one moment in Game 7.
Last regular season, Hoffman’s issue was home runs. He allowed 15 in just 68 innings, ballooning his ERA to 4.37. This year, it’s been walks and hit batters on top of the big blows, seemingly a new issue of control for the hard-throwing right-hander.
What both Atkins and John Schneider keep coming back to, though -- and rightfully so -- is the fact that Hoffman’s good days look truly great. Even amid this ugly start to 2026, he’s recorded 24 of his 32 outs via strikeouts, which is an absurd number for anyone not named Mason Miller. There were stretches of the ‘25 season, too, when Hoffman was truly dominant. At times, he wasn’t only saving games, he was winning them for the Blue Jays.
“I immediately think that we need to be better as an organization in the deployment of his arsenal and how we're helping him, putting him in situations [to] be successful, because of how good he has been and still is,” Atkins said.
That word just keeps coming up, “deployment."
Beyond an uptick in his splitter usage, there hasn’t been anything glaring in Hoffman’s pitch usage, but the Blue Jays are talking about very specific situations here. There have been fastballs where there should have been sliders and vice versa. One or two pitches along the way could have kept us away from this conversation entirely, so now, the Blue Jays want to shift Hoffman into some lower-leverage innings where it’s easier to tinker.
“What do we have to do to get you ahead in counts and keep you in counts?” John Schneider said. “Not falling behind, not getting 0-1 and falling to 2-1, just staying on the attack. We talked a lot about what pitches are used when and being more convicted in that. That’s really it. He’s still a damn good pitcher. I don’t want to lose sight of that.”
Regardless of how bumpy the path has been to this point and regardless of the frustration that’s built around Hoffman, he’s still capable of being a dominant back-end arm. Hoffman and the Blue Jays just need to find the way back to the best version of him and back to the ninth inning, which for now will belong to someone else.