Trevor Hoffman: Closing in on Cooperstown

This past January, three of the top 5 members of the career saves list were all on the Hall of Fame ballot together. Lee Smith, one of the top closers from the 1980’s, was on the BBWAA ballot for the 15th and final time while Trevor Hoffman and Billy Wagner were both on for the second time.

With 601 career saves, Hoffman is 2nd all-time to Mariano Rivera and, by being in the same statistical neighborhood as the great Mariano, is now on the cusp of a plaque in Cooperstown. In the vote this January, he earned 74% of the writers’ votes, just five votes shy of the magic number of 75% that triggers induction into the Hall. With history as a guide, it’s nearly certain that Hoffman will be a Hall of Fame inductee in 2018.

With 478 career saves, Smith is third on the all-time list and, on his final try via the writers’ ballot, received just 34% of the vote. That wasn’t nearly good enough but much better than the 10% received by Wagner, who is 5th on the all-time saves list with 422.

Cooperstown Cred: Trevor Hoffman

3rd year on the ballot (received 74% of the vote in 2017)

• 602 career saves (2nd best in MLB history to Mariano Rivera)
• Saved 40 or more games 9 times
• Career 2.87 ERA (141 ERA+)
• 2-time N.L. Cy Young runner up (1998 & 2006)
• 7-time All-Star

(cover photo: CBS Sports)

This piece contains some in-depth research into the careers of all of the top relief pitchers in the LCS era of baseball (1969 and beyond). The research goes beyond the leader-board generating tools available on Baseball Reference. With the game log resources available on that indispensable website, I was able to dive into the box scores of the top closers from the last 50 years to determine the true value that each of these great relief pitchers bestowed upon their teams.

I’ll start by stating that, before starting this research (which I did in the fall of 2015), my gut reaction on Hoffman, Smith and Wagner was “none of the above” with respect to the Hall of Fame. It’s not that they didn’t have great careers but, when evaluating closers, I’ve always felt that success in big games, October games in particular, was paramount to a Cooperstown resume.

Rivera, who will unquestionably gain nearly unanimously entry to Cooperstown in 2019, won five World Series with the Yankees and was by far the most valuable player over the totality of those championships. Rollie Fingers was a crucial cog in the Oakland A’s three titles in the 1970’s (and was on the mound to save the clinching games in both 1972 and 1974). Dennis Eckersley was on the mound when the A’s swept the Giants in 1989. Goose Gossage on the bump for the Yanks to close the 1978 title, Bruce Sutter on the hill when the Cardinals won in 1982, and Hoyt Wilhelm saved Game 3 of the New York Giants’ four-game sweep of the 1954 Series.

For every baseball fan (and voter), a Hall of Fame player means something slightly different. When I think about relief pitchers in particular, specific images pop into mind. For the four living Hall of Fame closers, the images are of celebrating championships, jumping into the arms of their catchers.

This is the indelible memory etched into my brain about Trevor Hoffman:

It was October 1, 2007. I was sitting in the sports book at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas with a great friend of mine, John Zentner. We were watching the Wild Card tiebreaker game between the San Diego Padres and Colorado Rockies. The Rockies were on an amazing run, having captured 13 of their last 14 contests, finishing the 162-game regular season schedule tied with the Pads at 89-73.

The Friars had their best pitcher, Jake Peavy, on the mound in the winner-take-all game (Peavy would win the Cy Young that season). But Coors Field is often unkind to even the best of hurlers and Peavy was tagged for 6 runs in in 6.1 innings. The Pads also managed 6 runs in the first nine innings and the contest went to extra frames.

In the top of the 13th, San Diego scored two runs and manager Bud Black brought in the team’s long-time relief ace to close the game and send his teammates to the playoffs. One of the announcers referred to “future Hall of Famer Trevor Hoffman” as the man entrusted to finish the job.

John and I both had a few shekels on the home-team Rockies and it looked like we had losing tickets but I leaned over and reassured him: “Trevor Hoffman is not a Hall of Famer. The Rockies are still in this game.”

Hoffman was already the all-time leader in saves (with 524 at the time) but I had a few games fresh on the brain. He had blown a save against the Brewers two days earlier in a game that could have wrapped up the playoffs for the Padres. I also recalled two saves he blew in three days to my hometown New York Mets in August. There was the 2006 All-Star game where he gave up a two-out, two-run triple by Michael Young to blow the game for the National League. And of course there was Game 3 of the 1998 World Series when the Padres, down two games to none and playing at home, desperately needed a win. Scott Brosius’ two-run home run resulted in a blown save by Hoffman; the Yankees won and capped a four-game sweep the next night.

My words to John that night proved to be prophetic: Kaz Matsui and Troy Tulowitzki both doubled for the Rockies; Matt Holliday then tripled off the right field wall to tie the game. He scored two batters later on a sacrifice fly by Jamey Carroll, sending the Rox to their first playoff appearance in 12 years and an eventual trip to the Fall Classic. In the heat of the moment, whether it was wishful thinking, false bravado or not, I felt that Hoffman was going to blow that big game, that he was a fantastic regular season pitcher but wouldn’t come through with the season on the line.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Despite his superlative 18-year career on the mound, my indelible image of Trevor Hoffman is walking off that mound in 2007. My indelible image of Lee Smith is of him walking off the mound after giving up a game-ending home run to Steve Garvey in Game 4 of the 1984 NLCS. The indelible images in my brian of Hall of Famers Fingers, Sutter, Gossage and Eckersley are of them celebrating World Series championships.

Fourteen years prior to that awful night, Trevor Hoffman made his major league debut in 1993, at the age of 25, with the Florida Marlins. On June 24th, he was traded to the San Diego Padres in a five-player deal that sent Gary Sheffield to the Sunshine State. Sheffield, incidentally, is also on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot. Once in San Diego, Hoffman became the team’s closer in 1994 and would not relinquish the role (except for 2003 when he was injured) until after the 2008 season. At both Qualcomm Stadium (and later PetCo Park), Hoffman, when summoned from the bullpen, entered to the lyrics of AC-DC’s “Hell’s Bells.” It was a tradition that started in July of 1998 and continued for the rest of his career in San Diego. Hoffman spent his last two seasons in Milwaukee before retiring after the 2010 season.

Hoffman, the younger brother of former MLB player and manager Glenn Hoffman, was an icon in San Diego second only to the late Tony Gwynn.  Like Gwynn, Hoffman was a gentleman. I personally met both of them several times during my ESPN years and they could not have been nicer. As a pitcher, Hoffman featured an incredible change-up. Like Rivera’s cutter, the change was Hoffman’s signature pitch. Hoffman rode that change to 601 career saves. He was not in Mariano’s class but that is not an insult. Rivera was the Babe Ruth of relief pitchers.

The question is whether is his 601 regular season saves is significant enough to be a Hall of Famer as a relief pitcher when you consider the big game failures.

Here’s a look at the post-season results for the five current Hall of Famers, the future inductee Rivera, plus Smith, Hoffman and Wagner (ranked by games pitched):

Obviously nobody has or ever will approach the great Mariano Rivera when it comes to the post-season. If either Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith or Billy Wagner (or a half a dozen others for that matter) had the good fortune of being on a perennial playoff team and delivering the results that Mariano did, they would be first-ballot Hall of Famers. But they’re all light years away.

Looking at the numbers, Rollie Fingers ranks second when it comes to post-season impact for a relief pitcher and he is significantly ahead of anybody else because of his integral role in three straight titles. Fingers’ Cooperstown credentials have been called into question by many in the sabermetric community because his regular season peripheral numbers (ERA, WHIP) are not outstanding for a relief pitcher. For me, though, he’s a no-doubt Hall of Famer because of the three rings and his critical role in those championships.

As for the other enshrined closers, Bruce Sutter’s record was solid, while Dennis Eckersley and Goose Gossage had mostly good October records despite a couple of famous missteps (notably at the hands of Kirk Gibson for both).

Hoffman and Wagner had a decent number of post-season opportunities and the results were poor. If you count the Wild Card tiebreaker fiasco (which was technically the 163rd regular season game but in today’s format would have been the official Wild Card game and part of the post-season record), Hoffman’s ERA rises to 5.54 and his save% drops to 57%.

Smith only made it to the post-season twice (with the Cubs in 1984 and the Red Sox in 1988) and did poorly both times, most notably in 1984 with the Garvey walk-off home run.

Is it fair to put so much significance on what is a limited sample size of post-season opportunities for Hoffman, Wagner and Smith? Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I think there is no other player role where post-season performance matters more than it does for an ace relief pitcher. Wasn’t that the #1 lesson of the 2016 post-season as we watched Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman lead their teams to the World Series?

Think about how relief pitchers contribute to the overall success of a team during the regular season. Modern relief pitchers appear in less than half of their team’s games, they only face about 300 batters a year and contribute nothing offensively. Starting position players generally have 600 plate appearances (nearly double the number of batter-pitcher battles for relief aces) and most position players contribute defensively (with the DH being the exception). While it’s true that most of a closer’s batter-pitcher matchups occur in high leverage late inning situations, those situations are magnified and more frequent in a typical post-season.

So, for me, a relief pitcher has to have an overwhelming regular season resume if they did not contribute to any championships for their teams.  So let’s dive into the regular season records for the existing Hall of Famers plus Rivera, Smith, Hoffman, and Wagner.

There are some key stats for which the casual reader may not be familiar, two of which are not in the Glossary on this site because they’re rarely used:

IR (inherited runners) and IS% (percentage of inherited runners who scored) are included on the chart below. These are “on fire” situations, when a relief pitcher enters the game with runners on base, something very common in the ’70’s and ’80’s and becoming more and more non-existent for closers in the modern game.

There are a couple of takeaways here. First, notice that Billy Wagner’s ERA+ is significantly better than anyone else on the list not named Mariano. And, for his career, his .187 batting average against is the best of any of these closers and, in fact, the best in history for any relief pitcher tossing at least 750 innings. It’s because of his superiority in the basics of run prevention (preventing hits and runs) that some writers feel that Wagner, despite 179 less saves, belongs in Cooperstown along with Hoffman (or, in some cases, instead of him).

The one statistic on the chart above that stands out for Hoffman is his inherited runners scored percentage. Although he wasn’t asked to put out fires as often as the Hall of Famers from before 1990, when asked to strand runners on base, he was dramatically better than anybody else on this list and, for anyone tossing a minimum of 750 innings and with at least 100 inherited runners, is the best in baseball history. This is a highly relevant accomplishment. Despite the high-profile miscues, the vast majority of the time, when asked to put out a fire, Hoffman did it with high efficiency.

At first glance, the older existing Hall of Famer relief pitchers (Fingers, Gossage, Sutter and Wilhelm) don’t look very good when compared against the more recent closers but there is an apples to oranges factor here. Those four had something in common that Hoffman, Wagner (and, for the second half of his career, Smith) lack: they went multiple innings to save their games and thus, their task was more difficult than those who followed. The older relief stoppers would often come into a game with runners on base in the 7th or 8th inning, need to get out of that jam, and then come back and keep the opposition off the scoreboard for the rest of the game. So there were multiple innings in which a blown save could occur.

The save statistic cannot be fairly used to compare pitchers from the 1970’s or 1980’s to the closers of the 1990’s and 21st century. Simply put: saves today are cheaper than they once were. When Fingers retired 30 years ago, he was the only pitcher in history who had amassed over 300 saves; today there are 28 members of the 300-save club, with multiple members who will only get into the museum in Cooperstown at the turnstile.

Eckersley is the only mostly “one inning” closer in Cooperstown; it was his manager Tony La Russa who basically invented the concept that, more often than not, the relief ace would pitch in the 9th inning only. Today, the practice is commonplace and it’s been rare to ask a closer to get more than 3 outs although. with the 2016 playoffs as a lesson, we’re starting to slowly see a shift back to the old style relief stopper.

Take a look at the chart below: for eight great relief aces, it shows the total number of saves achieved in a “clean” 9th inning: that means that the pitcher entered the game with a lead of 3 runs or less and nobody on base.  I’ve included the same scenario when a pitcher enters a game in a save situation in extra innings in the bottom of the inning because the same win probability dynamics are in play. At the bottom of this table, I’ve also divided Lee Smith’s career into two halves of his career because his career spanned two different eras in terms off how relief aces were used.

A couple of things jump out at you: one is how infrequently Hall of Famers Fingers, Sutter and Gossage had the relatively “easy” save that is today’s norm. Also notice that, in the first half of his career, Lee Smith had fewer overall saves than in his second act but had drastically fewer 3-out saves.  Essentially, Smith was a contemporary of Sutter and Gossage from 1980 to 1988 and a contemporary of Eckersley from 1989-1997.

So the point here is this: you cannot compare Hoffman/Smith/Wagner/Eckersley with Fingers/Gossage/Sutter based on the total number of saves they accumulated.

Now, I am not trying to claim that a 3-out save is necessarily an “easy” save. If the closer is protecting a one-run lead, there’s nothing easy about it.  In 2016, if a closer entered the game in the top of the 9th with a one-run lead, the odds of victory for the team were about 85%; if entering the game in the bottom of the 9th with a one-run lead, the odds of team victory were about 80% (the precise probabilities are dependent on the ballparks). So, if your team has an 15%-to-20% chance at blowing the game, that’s a good spot for your closer.

However, when a closer is summoned to protect a 2-run or 3-run 9th inning lead, that starts to creep into the category of an “easy” save.

• One-run lead has a 80%-to-85% chance of victory
• Two-run lead has a 91%-to-94% chance of victory
• Three-run lead has a 96%-to-97% chance at victory

The truth is you don’t have to be a Hall of Fame caliber relief pitcher to protect a two or three run lead when entering the game with only three outs to get and no runners on base.

So, what percentage of saves were truly “easy” for the eight relief pitchers we’ve looked at? Concurrently, how many “tougher” saves did each earn in their career (for simplicity, defining loosely every save that isn’t a 3-out save with a two or three run lead).

What’s the takeaway here?  It’s that Trevor Hoffman, when it comes to the “not as easy” saves, looks pretty darn good when stacked up against the Hall of Famers and also the Great Rivera. Another takeaway is that the 300-save club boasts 28 members but only three of those members saved over 300 games that weren’t the “easy” ones (Rivera, Smith, Fingers). And speaking of Smith, who is no longer on the Hall of Fame ballot, he does compare pretty favorably to Sutter in the first half of his career and to Eckersley for the second half when it comes to save conversion %.

What Hoffman was, during the totality of his career, was the 2nd best relief pitcher in baseball. Although the save is “cheaper” than it was during the careers of Fingers, Gossage and Sutter, 601 saves is still 123 more than the man in 3rd place (Smith) and only 51 behind the king (Rivera). If you’re closer to Mariano Rivera on the plus side than you are to Lee Smith on the down side, that’s a nice feather in the cap.

Besides his 601 saves (even as we acknowledge that many were relatively “easy”), there are three statistics that make me feel that Hoffman is Cooperstown-worthy. One we have already seen, the fact that he only allowed 20% of inherited base-runners to score, significantly better than anyone else, including Rivera, who allowed 29% of such runners to cross the plate.

Hoffman’s stranded runner success translates into another statistic that elevates him as a stopper and partially puts him into the “fireman” category and not just a “show up in the 9th inning” closer.  The chart below shows eight of the relief aces we’ve discussed in their career success of saving games when entering the game with runners on base (the data for Wilhelm, who debuted in the 1950’s, is incomplete, so he’s not included here).

Now, this chart is not meant to slam the existing Hall of Famers (Gossage, Sutter, Fingers) who have low save percentages when entering with runners on base. They all entered many, many games with runners on base in the 6th, 7th or 8th innings, when they had to not only put out a fire but keep the fire out until the end of the game. But Hoffman’s numbers again are significantly better than his contemporary Rivera and near-contemporary Eckersley.  I’ll give some of the credit here to his long-time manager Bruce Bochy, who skippered the Pads from 1995 to 2006.  Bochy has proven (with three World Series titles to show for it) that he is a master of bullpen management. Still, you can only manage what you have and Bochy got the very best out of Trevor Hoffman.

Finally, let’s address the issue of Hoffman’s big-game failures chronicled above. Despite Hoffman’s superb 89% save conversion rate in games in which he entered with runners on base and his best in class 20% career inherited runner strand rate, is there evidence that the high-profile blown saves represented a trend that was carried over from the regular season? The answer is “no.” Hoffman’s success with runners on base and in high leverage situations translated into wins for his teams.

In the sea of advanced metrics in the game today, some of which require a degree from MIT to decipher, there’s one that I really like because it directly correlates to winning and losing the game. It’s a stat that doesn’t measure how good the formula thinks the player is, it measures what impact that player actually had on the game that was played in the real world.

This metric is called WPA (Win Probability Added). You can look at any play in nearly the last 100 years (in the game logs on Baseball Reference) and it will tell you to what degree that play increased or decreased the player’s team’s chances of winning. As I discussed earlier, if you’re a relief pitcher entering the game with a one-run lead in the bottom of the 9th inning, your team has about a 80% chance of winning. If you enter with a a three-run lead in the bottom of the 9th, your team’s odds are at about 96%. So, if you close out a one run win, you have increased your team’s chances of winning from 80% to 100% and thus are awarded with 0.20 WPA points, the 0.20 representing the 20% increased odds of winning. If you think about this logically, you’ll realize that it can also go the other way: you can have -0.80 WPA points if you blow that one-run lead.

Anyway, if you look at the career leaders in WPA for relief pitchers (the top seven plus the Hall of Famers), you can get an idea of how many times each pitcher performed deeds on the mound that either led to a win or a loss.

Now, remember that this isn’t a “rate” stat like ERA or WHIP. This is a “counting” stat like strikeouts or saves. Despite 720 fewer innings pitched, Hoffman bests Gossage in the key game-specific situations of increasing his team’s odds of winning. By the way, if you’re wondering what it means that Hoffman is “only” 5.2 points ahead of Wagner in WPA, just understand that 5.2 points represents a 18% difference. An extra 18% in WPA is a relief pitcher’s equivalent difference of a hitter’s difference between 450 and 531 home runs.

Finally, and this is the most important part of the Win Probability story, is how Hoffman’s WPA stacks up against the great starting pitchers in history. After all, when evaluating a Hall of Fame candidate, the bar should be higher for a relief pitcher because they don’t toss nearly as many innings as a starter.

For that reason, the revered statistic WAR (Wins Above Replacement) looks upon all relief pitchers not named Mariano with the same regard as a bucket of spit. You see, WAR is context-neutral and the more you pitch (or the more you hit), the more “Wins” above replacement players you can earn. A 1-2-3 inning in the 9th inning of a 13-0 game counts just as much with WAR as a 1-2-3 inning in a one-run game. Hoffman’s career WAR is 28.2, good for just 311th place among all pitchers. For him and any relief pitcher, the statistic is irrelevant.

The best way to compare relief pitchers to starting pitchers is through WPA because it measures the each game’s context-dependent result. WPA measurements on Baseball Reference goes back to 1930, the first year with complete play-by-play data. Anyway, despite the disadvantage of vastly fewer innings pitched, Hoffman’s WPA for pitchers is 21st best in MLB history.

14 of the 20 pitchers ahead on this list in the Hall of Fame. The 6 who aren’t? Roger Clemens, MIA for obvious reasons, Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina (both who are on the ballot and absolutely deserve to be in), still-active Clayton Kershaw and the late Roy Halladay and Mariano, who will be on next year’s ballot in December 2018.

There are 24 Hall of Fame pitchers (19 of them starters) who are behind Hoffman on this list.

Now, to circle back to our painful story of Hoffman’s blown save in the 13th inning to the Rockies at the end of the 2007 season, his WPA that day was -0.895. The Padres had an 89.5% chance of winning that game when he entered and, because they lost, he gets docked nearly a full point in WPA. From a WPA standpoint, it was the fourth worst blown save of his entire career.

Trevor Hoffman’s failures in big games are significant. They are real and they are painful, to him and to all Padres fans. If he was a borderline candidate, I might say that those failures would be enough to tilt the scales against him. But Trevor Hoffman is not a borderline candidate. I rescind the comment I made to my friend John at the Bellagio in October 2007. Between his raw save total and his success in high-leverage save situations, Hoffman’s overall record merits a Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown.

Thanks for reading.

Chris Bodig