Padres reliever Trevor Hoffman spent a fair amount of his
childhood trying to get his older brothers, Glenn and Greg, to
let him join in their games. Ping-Pong, basketball, Wiffle
ball—you name it. Glenn, who is 10 years older than Trevor, and
Greg, who is four years older than Glenn, would go head-to-head
while Trevor would sit by and watch. "No matter what they were
doing, I always wanted to be around them," says Trevor. "They
used me as their human remote control, but I couldn't be around
them enough."
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Trevor (right) is finally getting his shot at
brother Glenn.
(Robert Beck)
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Perhaps the most intense brotherly battles were fought in the
dining room of the Hoffmans' Anaheim home, where Glenn and Greg
would hang team banners from the chandelier and then play
Strat-O-Matic baseball until all hours of the morning. "The
dining room would look like some kind of war room," says Trevor,
who would sneak down from his bedroom and plead to at least be
allowed to roll the dice once in a while.
Last weekend the scene repeated itself at Dodger Stadium.
Forty-year-old Glenn was managing a baseball team—this time a
real one, the Dodgers—and doing his best to keep his pesky
little brother, who just happens to be the best closer in the
majors, from joining the fun. "I didn't want to see him [come
into the game], so I shot some bullets early," Glenn said after
last Friday night's 6-2 win, in which he used his top pinch
hitter, Jim Eisen reich, in the sixth inning in hopes of erasing
a 2-1 deficit before Trevor might be summoned.
You can't blame Glenn. Trevor hasn't blown a save since the days
when there were 28 teams and five Spice Girls. He began his
career, like Glenn, as an infielder, but was only a one-tool
player. He couldn't hit for average or power, couldn't catch the
ball and couldn't run. The only thing he could do was throw. But
he did it well enough that in 1991 the Reds, who had drafted him
two years earlier, suggested that he take up pitching. "I could
throw strikes across the diamond, so I figured I could do it from
60 feet, six inches," Trevor says.
In the lower minors his 95-mph gas was enough to get by on. He
saved 20 games and struck out 75 hitters in 472/3 innings in his
first season as a pitcher, at Class A Cedar Rapids and Double A
Chattanooga. As he worked his way up through the Cincinnati
system, he added a curveball and a wicked changeup. The Marlins
plucked him out of Triple A in the 1992 expansion draft, and
after half a season shipped him to San Diego, where he has become
the most reliable closer in the game. Since last Aug. 22 he has
converted 35 straight save opportunities, including 27 this year.
Number 27 came on Sunday against Los Angeles, in the final game
of the four-game set that marked Glenn's first critical series
since he replaced Bill Russell as manager on June 21. Trevor's
team won the bigger battle as well, as the Padres took two of
the four games in L.A. to maintain their 13 1/2 game cushion
over the Dodgers in the West Division. Glenn's chances of
removing the "interim" from his title may now depend on how the
team does in the wild-card race. At week's end L.A. was 6 1/2
games back.
That the Hoffman brothers are playing such significant roles in
Southern California baseball shouldn't come as a surprise. Their
father, Ed, who died three years ago, was a local baseball
legend. After ending a professional singing career, he took a
part-time job at Anaheim Stadium and became famous as the Singing
Usher. He regularly led the crowd in seventh-inning renditions of
Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and if there was ever a problem
finding someone to sing the national anthem, Ed was always ready
to fill in. "If they ever got in a pinch, he'd always say, 'Give
me five minutes to get loose,' then he'd come in," Trevor says.
"I guess he was the family's first saver."
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Issue date: July 20, 1998
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