The Twins’ bullpen plans for next season took a small detour, but the team doesn’t expect Jeff Hoffman’s elbow surgery to knock him off course for long.
Minnesota said the right-hander had arthroscopic surgery on his right elbow that included debridement and the removal of a bone chip. According to the club, Hoffman is expected to start a throwing program in eight weeks and should be ready for the start of the 2027 season. Dan Hayes of The Athletic reported the details.
Hoffman, who turns 34 in January, came over from the Blue Jays at this year’s trade deadline as the Twins tried to make a postseason push. They added him along with Dean Kremer from the Orioles and A.J.
Minter from the Mets, but the run never materialized. Minnesota went 21-30 in August and September and ended up seven games out of a playoff spot.
Hoffman was not the problem. After the trade, he logged 18 innings and gave up five earned runs for a 2.50 ERA.
The walk rate was ugly at 15.6%, but he struck out 35.1% of the hitters he faced. When you fold in his work with Toronto, he finished the year with a 3.55 ERA, a 34.9% strikeout rate, a 10.3% walk rate and a 44.7% ground ball rate over 66 innings.
The contract piece matters, too. Hoffman’s three-year deal, originally signed with the Blue Jays, still has one season left. He’s due $11 million next year, with Toronto covering $3.75 million of that as part of the trade, which leaves the Twins responsible for $7.25 million.
His recent track record has been a bit of a roller coaster. Over his 2023 and 2024 seasons with the Phillies, Hoffman threw 118 2/3 innings with a 2.28 ERA, a 33.4% strikeout rate, a 7.4% walk rate and an 8.3% home run-to-fly ball rate.
In 2025 with the Blue Jays, his ERA jumped to 4.37 even though the strikeout and walk numbers stayed strong, and 20% of his fly balls left the yard. He settled in during the playoffs with a 1.46 ERA, though that stretch will be remembered just as much for the game-tying Miguel Rojas home run in the ninth inning of Game Seven of the World Series.
The 2026 season brought a different kind of bad luck. The home run rate came back down to a more ordinary 7.7%, but Hoffman got hammered by balls in play.
He carried a .389 batting average on balls in play with the Jays before the trade, which helped drive his ERA to 3.89 despite the strong underlying numbers. Minnesota took the view that his talent would win out over the 2025 homer spike and the early-2026 batted-ball noise.
After the trade, Hoffman did walk too many hitters, but he was clearly better at keeping runs off the board.
The Twins gave up Dasan Hill, John Klein and Dameury Pena to get him, and they’ll be counting on Hoffman to be a key part of next year’s bullpen if the recovery goes as planned. The process could be affected by the looming lockout.
Major League Baseball is expected to lock out the players when the collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of the day on December 1, which would shut down communication between players and club personnel until it ends. If Hoffman is healthy for 2027, he and Yoendrys Gómez project as two of Minnesota’s top late-inning arms.
There’s still room for the Twins to add more relief help. The organization has not usually spent heavily on relievers, with its last multi-year free-agent bullpen deal being a two-year contract for Addison Reed in 2018. But owner Tom Pohlad has been talking about increasing payroll, and that could give the front office more room to be aggressive.
A trade could be another path. Minnesota had a deal in place at the deadline that would have sent Trevor Larnach to Houston for Bryan Abreu, but Astros owner Jim Crane blocked it. Larnach remains in the mix on a crowded corner outfield depth chart, and while Abreu is now a free agent, the Twins could still explore moving Larnach for another arm.
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