Dingle All the Way

OK, I give. I did not expect the Detroit Tigers to have the best record in baseball a week into June. Or at any point in the season, to be honest. We all knew that this was a playoff team with some developing young talent still in the pipeline; a return to the postseason and a run at the AL Central title seemed like reasonable goals. But the Tigers have not only done what was expected (Tarik Skubal’s continued excellence) and hoped for (former no. 1 picks Spencer Torkelson and Casey Mize leveling up), they’ve gotten breaks they could not even have dreamed of (Zach McKinstry’s .360 OBP).

But one obvious place the Tigers were set to improve was behind the plate. Jake Rogers is a terrific defender, and not as bad a hitter as I thought before I looked up his numbers. Which is to say I thought his numbers were horrendous; they were merely bad. Rogers was one of just 12 players to hit under .200 in 300 or more PA last year; out of 286 players who hit that playing time threshold, he was in the bottom 20 in wRC+.

Great defense behind the plate covers for a lot of offensive sins, but speaking generally, playoff teams don’t like to have a guy in the lineup every day who makes outs 75% of the time. Surely, there’s a way to achieve equivalent defense without giving up quite so much offense?

Good news; Dillon Dingler is here, and he can do better than that.

Dingler has been in Detroit’s system for a while; he was the first pick in the second round of the 2020 draft out of Ohio State. (Which is kind of awkward, an Ohio State guy going to play in Michigan. But if the Columbus Blue Jackets can have four Michigan Wolverines on their roster at one time, the Tigers can surely survive having one Buckeye.)

As a physically mature college prospect at an up-the-middle position, I expected Dingler to move quickly, and he might have if not for a meniscectomy and innumerable broken bones in his hands. This is Dingler’s sixth professional season and he’s played 100 games only once. Even for a catcher, that’s not a lot, and it explains why a player who played 50 games in Double-A in his age-22 season didn’t debut in the majors until he was almost 26.

Through his first 46 games in 2025, Dingler is hitting .296/.328/.467. His 126 wRC+ is tied for third among catchers with at least 150 PA; he’s fourth among catchers in WAR, behind Cal Raleigh (by a lot), Will Smith, and Gabriel Moreno (by a couple tenths of a win). Good company to keep. He leads all Tigers position players in WAR, and if you include pitchers in the calculus, Dingler is second on the team in WAR behind only Skubal.

Impressive, to say the least.

Dingler is already tickling Rogers’ WAR total from last season because of his bat, which is productive without setting the world on fire. There are real holes in Dingler’s offensive game. His plate discipline is poor; he has a 14th-percentile chase rate and a first-percentile walk rate. He’s walked just five times (plus three hit-by-pitches) in 179 plate appearances. He strikes out too much. His exit velocities are average.

But Dingler gets his money’s worth. He has 12 hits this season with a projected distance of 275 feet or more; eight of them have been to the pull side, and five of those have been home runs. His in-air pull rate is in the top quarter of the league. Dingler is a perfectly modern hitter.

But it also turns out that he, like Rogers, is a terrific defensive catcher.

Dingler is seventh among major league catchers in framing runs this year, which is very good but not an outlier. He’s a third of a run ahead of Austin Hedges, for instance, but in more than twice as many innings behind the plate. Good framing, then, but he’s not making Patrick Bailey sweat either. In terms of controlling the running game, it’s more of the same: Dingler’s got one of the strongest arms in the majors, but post-knee injury, he’s no longer posting sub-1.8 pop times. That extra tenth or two lost before the throw leaves Dingler as merely an average-to-above-average thrower, despite his cannon arm.

Where he stands out is blocking. It’s a small sample, so I’m trying not to get excited, but I’m open to the possibility that Dingler is the best blocking catcher we’ve seen since this kind of thing has been measured.

After the meniscus injury, Dingler moved to a one-knee-down catching posture. That was a big culture war thing on Baseball Twitter a year or two ago; I don’t know if guys who get kicked out of their kids’ Little League games are still up in arms about this approach, but it doesn’t seem to hurt Dingler’s blocking.

According to Baseball Savant, Dingler has 11 blocks above average this season. No other catcher in baseball has more than six. That’s already tied for the 25th-best blocking season since 2018, the first season Savant has this stat. And we’re only a third of the way through the season. Dingler will pass the 400-inning mark for the year this weekend; top starting catchers usually log about 1,000 innings behind the plate. On a per-game basis, Dingler is already having the best blocking season since 2018 by any catcher with at least 40 starts behind the plate.

In order to figure out what makes Dingler a great blocker, I watched the man work. When I think of a great blocker, I think of a catcher who moves his torso around to stay in front of the ball, but Dingler’s the opposite. I was astonished by how little he moves.

Every catcher in the league goes one-knee-down at some point during the pitch; if there’s a backstop who stays on his toes the whole time, none springs immediately to mind. But every catcher gets there differently. Adley Rutschman, J.T. Realmuto, and Smith start in an orthodox two-point squat, then drop their entire left shin to the ground during the pitcher’s windup:

Catchers who start OKD (Dingler, Bailey, William Contreras) stick their right knee down and splay out the left. Here’s Contreras blocking a ball in the dirt:

You can see how the orthodox stance with the left leg out looks easier to explode out of — for the purpose of standing up to throw, or for scooting laterally to get in front of a 58-foot breaking ball. Rutschman has his dominant leg cocked and loaded, his spikes already dug into the dirt. Contreras looks like he could use the help of a grab bar like you’d find in accessible public restroom stalls.

Dingler doesn’t get up. When a ball bounces to an inconvenient place, he smothers it with his glove (which looks enormous, by the way — remind me to start asking catchers about their mitts the next time I go to the ballpark). But the ball doesn’t get away that often, because of how he sits:

Dingler’s left leg isn’t just a balance point. He sticks his leg out in front of him, and when he really wants to get low, he almost straightens it. That drops his butt right down into the dirt, leaving a five-hole that’s small enough to be covered by Dingler’s mitt. He doesn’t need to stack the pads and slide because he’s turned his entire lower body into a gigantic dust pan, funneling all the detritus off the floor and into a place where it can be disposed of easily.

There is no need to chase the ball when the ball is already in hand. The mountain, at last, comes to Mohammed.

Dingler is by no means the perfect catcher, or hitter, but he’s giving the Tigers Rogers-level defense and Mickey Tettleton-level offense all at the same time. Maybe you can’t have it all, but you can have most of it.