Jeff Hoffman and the Blue Jays have come a long way since 2015 deadline

If Ross Atkins had been the General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2015, Jeff Hoffman may be celebrating his tenth year as a member of the Blue Jays this season.

Hoffman was a talented first round draft pick (No. 9 overall) of the Blue Jays in 2014 and less than a year later he was shipped to Colorado at the deadline in a deal for Troy Tulowitzki and LaTroy Hawkins. It was one of several big moves previous GM Alex Anthopoulos made in an effort to get the Blue Jays back into contention.

The move worked - the Blue Jays went on to win their first AL East title since 1993 and came within a couple of wins from taking the AL pennant. However, the move was criticized by incoming President Mark Shapiro about that deal and Anthopolous wasn't the GM for very long after the end of the season.

Shapiro brought in Atkins during the winter of 2015 and while he's made several trades over his tenure to flip some higher ranked prospects, Hoffman feels like the kind of player Atkins would have had a hard time letting go of.

Jeff Hoffman and the Blue Jays have come a long way since 2015 deadline

Both Hoffman and the Blue Jays have had their ups and downs over the last ten years since that day in July in which the Blue Jays sent him to Colorado. Despite joining the Rockies just as they were getting to a high point in their franchise's history, Hoffman found very little success in his five seasons with the Rockies.

While the team posted a winning record in 2017 and then won a playoff series in 2018, Hoffman barely contributed. He pitched just 230 innings at the big league level during his tenure there, racking up just 197 strikeouts but surrendering 164 runs, with an ERA of 6.40 in 68 games, with 38 of them starts.

“The resources they had in place and to help guys get better and to help guys reach their full potential, I think was lacking,” Hoffman told Sportsnet reporter Shi Davedi about his experience with the Rockies. “I feel like if you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards, and I definitely don't feel like I was moving forward. I definitely don't think I would be who or where I am now without all that happening, so I definitely don't lose sight of that. I just think that definitely kind of halted some things that I didn't really figure out until I got to Cincinnati.”

The Blue Jays of 2025 are sure glad Hoffman figured those things out as he has helped transform a Blue Jays bullpen that had been one of the worst in the league just one year ago. While he's been susceptible to the long ball this season - he's also kept hitters to a .216 batting average against and is striking guys out a 33.5 K% rate - the second highest rate of his career.

The Blue Jays, since trading Hoffman, have made four postseason appearances after 2015, but outside of their 2016 run to the ALCS, they have failed to win a single playoff game. Hoffman not only found success with the Reds in 2021 and 2022, but his two years in Philadelphia also resulted in two trips to the postseason, while he morphed himself into one of the premier shutdown relievers in the game.

While he didn't appear in this three-game series against the Rockies in Colorado, it still felt like a full circle moment for the 32-year-old native of Latham, New York to go back to the city he was once traded to in a deadline deal. Hoffman says, he enjoyed this years deadline much more than the one 10 years ago.

"I was as excited as anyone waking up and checking every morning as the deadline was getting closer. I always think it's funny because all the names that might be out there and whoever it is that teams are interested in, and then you have a deadline like the Blue Jays had, where you get a couple of guys flying under the radar, but as good as anybody that got traded. I always think that's really cool."