John E. Sokolowski and Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

The Toronto Blue Jays, wedged as they are between punting this season and reloading for 2027 and beyond, have traded reliever Jeff Hoffman to the Twins for three prospects — pitchers Dasan Hill and John Klein, second baseman Dameury Pena — plus $250,000 in international bonus pool space.

The Jays, ever tinkering, also sent left-handed pitcher Adam Macko to the Rangers for infielder Josh Smith and minor league righty Josh Stephan.

Hoffman is the best player on the move, and based on his landing spot, the likeliest to play a meaningful role in the playoffs, so let’s deal with him first.

The Twins hit the deadline in a weird position. They’re just four games out of the AL Central lead and a single game adrift of the last AL Wild Card spot. But the quality of the American League this year is such that I cannot describe it accurately without using language that would upset the sensibilities of my bosses. That means the Minnesota Twins, playoff contenders, are also a game under .500.

What do the Twins do in that situation? Stock up on pitching, apparently. They traded for A.J. Minter on Thursday evening and added starter Dean Kremer from Baltimore on Friday. Minter and Kremer are both competent enough pitchers for the regular season, but I’d rather cut off a toe than use either in a close playoff game.

Hoffman’s relationship with close playoff games is complicated, as I’ll explain in a minute, but he’s clearly the best pitcher the Twins picked up at the deadline.

Hoffman has a 3.94 ERA this season, which doesn’t look like anything special, but that number is inflated by a couple nasty blowups (a single five-run outing in May is responsible for 0.9 of a run of Hoffman’s ERA) and some bad luck: a .389 BABIP and 65.7% LOB%, after five years of strand rates in the mid-to-high 70s and low 80s. In June, Davy Andrews wrote a post titled “Jeff Hoffman and the Worst BABIP of All Time,” which is not the kind thing you write about a pitcher who’s skating by on luck.

Hoffman is striking out 34.9% of opponents this year, which is the fifth-highest mark among qualified relievers in 2026. His K-BB% (26.5%) and FIP (2.49) both lead all relievers who moved at the deadline. Hoffman’s salary, $12.67 million both this year and in 2027, is a non-trivial number. It’s the third-highest commitment the Twins have on the books for 2027, after Pablo López and Byron Buxton.

But that’s an entirely reasonable figure for a high-leverage reliever, which is what Hoffman has been for the past four seasons.

The story of how Hoffman got there is interesting: Toronto made him the ninth overall pick in 2014, despite recovering from Tommy John surgery. This was back when an elite college prospect with a busted UCL was news, and not the norm. Before Hoffman threw a professional pitch, he got caught up in the José Reyes-for-Troy Tulowitzki trade and spent the rest of the 2010s lost in the Rockies organization.

In 2023, Hoffman caught on with the Phillies more or less as the result of a blind audition. The Twins (no one ever gets into the Hoffman business only once, it seems) had just cut Hoffman at the end of spring training, and the Phillies gave him a minor league deal. Hoffman struggled early in the season at Triple-A, but he was pressed into service as a glorified batting practice pitcher for Bryce Harper, who was rehabbing from his own Tommy John surgery. When his sparring partner showed up throwing 97 mph with a nasty slider, an impressed Harper showered praise on the right-hander and demanded that the Phillies promote Hoffman to the majors as soon as possible. He made his season debut in early May, and quickly became the best right-handed arm in one of the National League’s deepest bullpens.

Finally entitled to free agency after two seasons with the Phillies, Hoffman signed a three-year, $33 million contract with the Blue Jays, with the aim of becoming a capital-C closer and not just first among equals in an egalitarian, matchup-based setup.

It’s been an up-and-down time in Toronto for Hoffman, but the stuff remains the same: The foundation of his success is an upper-90s fastball with some of the nastiest arm-side movement in the league. That’s supplemented by a slider, against which opponents have a .174 xBA and a .236 xSLG this year, and an upper-80s splitter that tunnels with the fastball. Hoffman also throws the odd sinker against righties, but that’s his fourth-most important pitch by far.

Hoffman misses bats, strikes batters out, doesn’t walk his way into trouble, and this year he’s even getting a bunch of grounders. He’s been a closer, a setup man, and a stopper. On paper, the Twins have an ideal playoff reliever here.

In practice, things have been inconsistent. Hoffman has made 21 postseason relief appearances in his career; 16 have been scoreless. The other five include three multi-run blowups that cost the Phillies playoff games. By WPA, Hoffman has two of the six worst relief appearances in Phillies postseason history. Mitch Williams is the only other pitcher with multiple entries in the top 10.

In addition to those three rough outings for Philadelphia, there’s also Hoffman’s most recent playoff appearance:

Hoffman got tagged with -0.168 WPA for this game. But because it was a game-tying home run in Game 7 of the World Series, that Miguel Rojas dinger goes down as the 12th-most pivotal play in baseball history, by championship win probability added. (It was in the top 10 when it happened, but two plays from the 11th inning of the same game passed it.)

Not the kind of event you want to make a habit of being on the wrong side of.

I don’t think Hoffman is cursed, or even necessarily un-clutch. As far as I’m aware, he’s handled all of those high-leverage failures about as well as you can. But if the Twins give Hoffman the ball in the ninth inning of a close playoff game, Fox or TBS is going to show you the Rojas homer.

Bad playoff mojo or not, Hoffman is about as good a reliever as you’d find on this year’s market, and he’s under control through 2027. So what did the Twins give up to get him?

You’re probably aware that a year ago, Minnesota made roughly 100 trades at the deadline, shipping off half its big league roster, give or take, in the span of about two days. As a result, the Twins came into this year’s deadline up to their eyeballs in prospect depth. It’s from that depth that they paid the price for Hoffman.

The Twins avoided paying out of their top tier of prospects; Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan’s ranking, which came out in June, had six Twins prospects with a 50 FV grade and four others rated with a 45. All 10 of those players stayed put.

The top prospect to move is 20-year-old Dasan Hill, whom the Twins bought out of a commitment to Dallas Baptist with an over-slot bonus in the second round of the 2024 draft. “Commitment to Dallas Baptist” tells you everything you need to know about Hill: Odd first name, 6-foot-5, fastball up to 99 mph with a plus slider.

The Twins were aggressive with Hill, skipping him over the Complex League entirely, and he dominated Low-A as a 19-year-old. In his second full pro season, he’s showing the potential for four plus pitches, but he’s having a hard time commanding them. When it comes to prospects, the numbers don’t always tell you the whole story, but Hill’s numbers get you in the ballpark: 45 innings, 77 strikeouts, 37 walks, 5.80 ERA.

Projectable 20-year-old lefties who sit in the upper 90s with feel for two plus breakers don’t exactly grow on trees. No doubt the Blue Jays’ minor league coaches are making grabby hands at news of this trade, and they could not care less what Hill’s ERA is.

The 6-foot-5, 225-pound Klein was an undrafted free agent out of Iowa Central Community College in 2022. The no. 34 prospect in Minnesota’s system at the time of the trade, he’s now sitting 94-96 as a one-inning reliever, with decent swing-and-miss rates, but at 24 years old, Klein has yet to establish a reliable second pitch. Both his curveball and split-change have shown good movement, but he can’t command either well enough to make them viable major league weapons. If he can get one or both of them to work, he could be a decent mid-leverage arm.

Pena is batting an even .300 across two levels of A-ball this year, with more walks than strikeouts, but he’s 5-foot-10 without much additional projectability, and he’s hit just 10 home runs across of four professional seasons, going all the way back to the DSL. He was near the bottom of the Twins’ prospect raking, with a 35+ FV grade.

In the trade with the Rangers, the Jays added two much more developed players in Smith and Stephan.

Smith was the Rangers’ fix-it guy for the past five years; in 501 career big league games, he’s made at least 25 appearances at five defensive positions, and he’s touched down at least once at every position except pitcher and catcher.

When Smith was on at the plate (he hit .254/.336/.380, for a wRC+ of 107 across 2024 and 2025), he was about an average regular, with his multipositionality (if that’s a word) providing extra value by means of roster flexibility.

This year, Smith is hitting .213/.299/.272, which is not good enough to warrant playing time anywhere. He doesn’t hit the ball hard, but he makes plenty of contact and will take a walk.

Smith is making $3.225 million in his first trip through arbitration; the Jays run a big payroll and love utility infielders more than I love anything in the entire world, so it’s worth taking a flyer and seeing if Smith bounces back. You can also see why the Rangers might want to find someone younger, cheaper, or better to do Smith’s job.

Stephan is, as far as I’m aware, unrelated to Guardians pitcher and fellow Texan Trevor Stephan. Or, for that matter, to Khal Stephen, whom Toronto traded to Cleveland a year ago. Josh Stephan is 24, a fixture in the Rangers’ Triple-A rotation at Round Rock. There, he’s had to bob and weave to miss bats, on account of suboptimal fastball velocity and shape. But a nasty two-plane slider and plus command make Stephan a useful depth arm. He’s thrown more than 100 innings in each of the past two seasons, and an appetite for innings will get him to the big leagues, either as a long reliever or a no. 5 starter

That seems like a pretty decent haul in exchange for Macko, a 25-year-old rookie who came to Toronto from Seattle in the 2022 Teoscar Hernández trade. Macko’s fastball averages 94.5 mph, without exceptional movement, and he gets much more mileage out his slider — his most common pitch — and his changeup, which is a weapon against righties. It’s a very, very small sample, but Macko’s changeup has generated a .091 opponent batting average and a 44.4% whiff rate this year.

Macko has had three different stints in the majors this year, and that’s probably his most conspicuous point of value for the Rangers: As a cheap, live-armed, optionable left-hander. It’s a living.