A brief spring training stint transformed the right-hander into the reliever he is today.
Jeff Hoffman didn't spend much time talking about his first appearance in a Minnesota Twins uniform Wednesday night. It lasted all of 11 pitches anyway.
Instead, the conversation drifted back several years to a brief stint on Minnesota's spring training roster in 2023, when he was still searching for an answer that had followed him through much of his career.
For Hoffman, that answer turned out to be a slider.
"The years leading up to my time in spring training with Minnesota, I was kind of banging my head on the wall a lot with my slider," Hoffman said postgame, via Twins TV. "I knew that was the pitch that I needed to figure out within my arsenal."
That admission explains why Minnesota believed in him enough to strike a deal with the Blue Jays and bring him along for the stretch run.
His first outing couldn't have gone much better. Entering in the eighth inning against Kansas City, Hoffman needed only 11 pitches to retire all three hitters, striking out two. It looked routine, but the version of Hoffman the Twins acquired is much different from the one who spent years trying to make a curveball work.
Back then, Hoffman already possessed the raw ingredients. His fastball had life. His splitter gave hitters another velocity band to consider. What he lacked was a breaking ball that fit alongside them.
Rather than trying to reinvent himself completely, he described working toward something more specific.
"I needed a smaller, sharper breaking ball," Hoffman said. "We worked on a way that we could throw a breaking ball in that same velocity range as the splitter so they would both fly together, and then before the last five feet kind of move their different ways."
The goal wasn't simply adding another pitch. It was making every pitch play better.
Hoffman said he also had to rethink the way he approached hitters.
"I bought into the fact that I'm not really a command guy," he said. "I'm going to have success by making them make the mistake and swinging at pitches they shouldn't be swinging at."
That philosophy has shaped the reliever he has become.
Hoffman joins Minnesota as another high-leverage option rather than a designated closer, giving manager Derek Shelton another arm capable of handling the toughest parts of opposing lineups while easing the workload on Yoendrys Gomez and Andrew Morris.
It also comes after Hoffman leaned even further into the slider during the second half of his season.
"We started out the season with some tough luck," Hoffman told MLB.com's Matthew Leach. "Doubling down on my strengths, we're throwing the slider more. I think it's my best pitch."
Deadline deals are usually judged by what happens over the final two months. Hoffman's first outing offered little reason to worry about that. But this trade in particular was built on a pitch he spent years refining, dating back to a full-circle moment in Minnesota. One that, fittingly enough, began taking shape inside the same organization now counting on it again.
