The Best Catcher In Baseball Is Dead. Long Live The (New) Best Catcher In Baseball.

To repurpose an old quote about the weather, if you don’t like the identity of the best catcher in baseball, just wait a year and you’ll have a new best catcher in baseball. It’s almost uncanny. Every year, there are two contenders for best catcher in baseball. And every year, one of them falls to the wayside, to be replaced by someone new. It’s like clockwork:

Last year was an exception to the rule in that Cal Raleigh was a lot better than Alejandro Kirk, but for the most part, the top two catchers in the game have put up similar WAR. It’s hard to stand out all the way at catcher, and it’s also hard to stay near the top for long. Truthfully, that isn’t all that surprising. Catching is phenomenally difficult on the body, and WAR is a counting stat. The best catchers play a lot, and they wear down. Before long, they’re either playing less often or playing less effectively.

With that backdrop, you might expect one of Kirk or Raleigh to be clinging to the top spot while a new contender appears. But that hasn’t happened. They’ve both been hurt – Raleigh missed a month on the IL, and Kirk missed more than two. And they’ve both played poorly when healthy – both are off to the worst offensive starts of their careers, though Kirk’s is in a tiny sample. There’s still more than half a season to play, and it’s reasonable to think that the two of them might end up posting solid numbers the rest of the way, but they’ve racked up a combined 0.5 WAR so far this year. It’s safe to say that there will be some new faces at the top.

Shea Langeliers, who Jay Jaffe wrote about earlier this year, looks like the real deal. He’s putting together a second straight season with a wRC+ around 130, and while he’s a below-average framer, he’s much improved on that end. But Jay already wrote about him, so we won’t be covering him today. Plus, Langeliers’ 2.3 WAR through Tuesday’s games is second among catchers. The guy in first place? That’d be Dillon Dingler, whose 3.8 WAR laps the field and has him tied for second place among American League hitters regardless of position.

Dingler, like many of the catchers who preceded him atop the WAR leaderboard, does a little bit of everything to get to his value. He’s first in the majors in framing and in the top five in blocking. He’s average at controlling the running game, which makes him a very good defender overall. None of that is new; he won a Gold Glove last year. But maintaining that level of defense is no given. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that the top of the catching leaderboard has seen so much upheaval.

J.T. Realmuto’s last elite defensive season was 2022, the last year he was at or near the top of the catcher WAR leaderboards. Adley Rutschman’s two years at the top were his two best defensive seasons. William Contreras was an elite framing catcher for exactly two years, and paced catchers in WAR both of those seasons. Heck, you can even throw Raleigh into that group. He’s a great defensive catcher, but his defense dipped last year when he had so much offensive responsibility, and he’s off to a slow start behind the dish in 2026. It’s hard to be a great defender, and even harder to keep doing so when you’re also carrying a heavy offensive load.

That brings us to the real reason that Dingler has been the best catcher in baseball this year: his offense. He’s hitting a robust .272/.339/.545 (again through Tuesday’s action), good for a 141 wRC+. He’s already clobbered 18 homers, more than doubling his career total. Before this year, he’d been roughly average offensively, but still quite valuable overall thanks to that great defense. Take a good defensive catcher and add the offense of a good DH, and you have the recipe for every single name on that list above.

If “get good at offense” were easy, everyone would do it. But Dingler’s transformation is a great example of how small changes can drive big improvements. In many fundamental ways, he hasn’t changed anything since last year. He isn’t swinging harder. He’s chasing more frequently than he did last year, but swinging less frequently at pitches in the strike zone. He’s still looking to lift and pull the ball; he has still never hit a home run to the opposite field as a big leaguer. But minor improvements can go a long way.

If I had to explain Dingler’s strong power output simply, I’d say this: He makes a lot of contact in the strike zone for someone who puts the ball in the air like he does. His zone contact rate of 90.7% is in the top quarter of the league. That might not sound like much, but consider the context. Faster swings generally mean less contact. Fly ball swings generally mean less contact. Only one hitter in baseball has a higher zone contact rate, faster average swing speed, and lower groundball-to-fly ball ratio: Yordan Alvarez. That’s great company to keep. The only hitters with even roughly similar numbers are Juan Soto, Kevin McGonigle, José Ramírez, and Trent Grisham.

I wish I could tell you how Dingler has accomplished this impressive feat. But the truth is that sometimes, hitters just get better. Dingler is making more in-zone contact against both fastballs and breaking balls. He’s struggled with changeups, and against lefties generally, but that feels like a small-sample issue more than anything else. Dingler has always made a good deal of in-zone contact. He’s just particularly dialed in right now.

There’s one minor detail, mostly outside of his control, that’s flattering his numbers at the moment. Pitchers like to aim for the shadow zone, the corners of the plate and the area just outside. Normally, they hit the shadow-in zone more often than they hit the shadow-out zone. In other words, they catch the corner a hair more often than they barely miss it. Last year, for example, Dingler saw 24% of pitches in the shadow-in zone, and 18% in the shadow-out zone. Pitchers as a whole are hitting shadow-in 22% of the time this year, and shadow-out 19.6%. But Dingler has seen more pitches that just missed than ones that just hit. One reason he’s making more zone contact is that the pitches he’s seeing in the strike zone are right on the corners less frequently than you’d expect.

I mentioned above that pitch location is mostly outside of Dingler’s control. He’s at the mercy of where pitchers choose to throw to him, of course, but that’s not quite the same as having no control. The most dangerous hitters in baseball all show this same pattern. Pitchers aren’t dummies – they nibble more against hitters who do more damage on contact, which leads to more pitches just off the edge of the plate. The word is out about Dingler’s newfound power surge, in other words.

I don’t expect Dingler to keep up this torrid power output. Yes, he’s made some changes to make more contact. Yes, he excels at lifting and pulling the ball. No, his true-talent isolated power is probably not the same as Kyle Schwarber’s career mark. Dingler has room to cool off significantly and still be very valuable offensively, though. Turn five of his homers into outs, and he’d still be about 20% above average. This kind of contact/power combination has a very high floor.

Dingler’s newfound ability to leave the park has also changed his role on the Tigers. In our Positional Power Rankings this spring, we projected six different Tigers for playing time at DH, and Dingler wasn’t one of them. But he’s been the best hitter on the team, period, so they’ve made adjustments to get him in the lineup more frequently. He’s up to 50 plate appearances at DH already, and I expect that to continue climbing, particularly when the Tigers face lefties. They have a boatload of left-handed hitters they’d prefer to platoon, Jahmai Jones isn’t crushing southpaws like he used to, and the team is desperate for offense overall. Plugging Dingler in at DH lets him play more often, and at the moment, it’s not much of a sacrifice offensively to play backup catcher Jake Rogers instead of some of the other guys who would be in the lineup if Dingler stayed behind the plate.

That expanded role might be part of why catchers never stay on top for long, in fact. Catching is tremendously hard on the body. These guys need frequent off days just to meet the physical challenges of the job. But when a catcher hits as well as Dingler is hitting this year, the equation changes. DH days replace rest days. Realmuto was something of an iron man at his peak, but Rutschman, Contreras, and Raleigh all saw their hitting responsibilities expand massively when they were at their best.

It’s hard to argue with the results. Contreras averaged about 140 plate appearances a year at DH when he was at his hitting best. Rutschman eclipsed 200 plate appearances DH’ing in 2023. Raleigh played 38 games at DH last year en route to hitting 60 home runs. Bonus offense out of a guy who would otherwise probably play only 500 or so plate appearances is just too good of a deal to pass up.

For those other players, the other shoe eventually dropped. They all saw their offense drop off. Throw in Sean Murphy and Will Smith if you’d like. The general rule is that carrying a full-time catcher workload and also DH’ing will eventually wear you down. But right now, Dingler is up to the task, and he’s the best thing the Tigers have going offensively. So long as they remain in the playoff hunt, however peripherally, I’m expecting more of the same. Consequences are for tomorrow. Right now, the Tigers are playing the hot hand.