Trevor Hoffman
Hall-of-Famers as Seen Through Player Won-Lost Records: Trevor Hoffman
Trevor Hoffman was elected to the Hall of Fame in his 3rd year of eligibility, 2000, with 79.9% of the vote.
Five highlights of Trevor Hoffman's career:
- Trevor Hoffman held the major-league record for career saves from September 24, 2006 until September 19, 2011. Hoffman's 601 career saves are the second most in major-league history.
- Trevor Hoffman won the NL Rolaids Relief Man award twice, in 1998 and 2006. The NL relief pitcher award was renamed in Trevor Hoffman's honor in 2014.
- Hoffman was named to seven All-Star teams. He received Cy Young votes four times, finishing second twice (in 1998 and 2006). He received MVP votes five times, with two top-10 finishes (also in 1998 and 2006).
- In 2004, Hoffman was awarded the Hutch Award, given by MLB to the player "who best exemplifies the fighting spirit and competitive desire of Fred Hutchinson". In 2006, Hoffman won the Lou Gehrig Memorial award, awarded to the player "who best exhibits the character and integrity of Lou Gehrig, both on the field and off it". In 2008, he won the Branch Rickey award "in recognition of his exceptional community service."
- Trevor Hoffman's brother, Glenn, played nine seasons in the major leagues as an infielder mostly with the Boston Red Sox. Glenn is nine years older than Trevor and played his last MLB game in 1989, four years before Trevor debuted.
The first two tables below present Trevor Hoffman's career as measured by Player won-lost records, in and out of context.
Trevor Hoffman is second in major-league history with 601 saves. Saves tend to be viewed with disdain among more sabermetic fans as are relief pitchers in general. And, in fact, on a straight value measure, using Player won-lost records, Mariano Rivera is probably the only relief pitcher that I would be inclined to vote into my personal Hall of Fame.
That said, I think that Trevor Hoffman is underrated by many sabermetric fans. For example, I have read a number of online fans who have argued that Billy Wagner was better than Trevor Hoffman. And it's not terribly difficult to understand why. For his career, Hoffman had a 2.87 ERA which Baseball-Reference translates into an ERA+ of 141, while Wagner had a career ERA of 2.31 (ERA+ of 187). Hoffman did pitch 186 more innings than Wagner (1089.1 to 903), but that's a big gap in ERA/ERA+.
ERA matters, but, for relief pitchers, perhaps not as much as you might think. First, there are inherited runners, whose runs are not charged to a relief pitcher but, depending on exactly what base they started on and how they scored, could be at least partly the fault of the reliever. Trevor Hoffman was exceptionally good at stranding inherited runners. For his career, he entered games with 346 runners on base, 70 of whom scored (20%). For his career, Billy Wagner allowed 28% of inherited runners to score (46 of 166).
But perhaps more importantly, while saves are, perhaps, somewhat overvalued, and the rigidity of the closer role based entirely on the save rule is silly and occasionally infuriating, the job of a closer entering a save situation is not really to minimize the number of runs allowed, it's to save the game. Now, the easiest way to do that, of course, is to retire as many batters as possible as quickly as possible. But, at the end of the day, the success of a closer is in the number of wins he closes out.
For his career, Trevor Hoffman had 601 saves, 18 holds, and 76 blown "saves" (blown saves mix situations that, if successful, could have been either holds or saves), a success rate (saves + holds divided by total chances) of 89.1%. Billy Wagner had 422 saves, 13 holds, and 69 blown saves, a success rate of only 86.3%.
And what about the man who broke Trevor Hoffman's career save record? In his career, Mariano Rivera allowed 29% of inherited runners to score (107 of 367) and had 652 saves, 28 holds, and 80 blown saves, a success rate of 89.5%, better than Hoffman's 89.1%, but not by all that much.
Player won-lost records are, of course, designed to measure precisely how a player contributes to his team's victories. For example, the split in blame for inherited runs scoring is calculated precisely based on the exact situation in which the runners are inherited.
The next table shows the top 10 relief pitchers as measured by pWins over replacement level. The table only includes players who earned a majority of their player decisions as a relief pitcher but includes all of their career decisions.
When the subject is relief pitchers, it's hard to beat Mariano Rivera. But Trevor Hoffman has a very good case for being the second-best relief pitcher in major-league history.
Article last updated: September 16, 2019
All articles are written so that they pull data directly from the most recent version of the Player won-lost database. Hence, any numbers cited within these articles should automatically incorporate the most recent update to Player won-lost records. In some cases, however, the accompanying text may have been written based on previous versions of Player won-lost records. I apologize if this results in non-sensical text in any cases.
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