OK, I’ll give it. I didn’t expect the Detroit Tigers to have the best record in June’s weekly baseball. Honestly, at any time of the season. We all know that this is a playoff team, some of the young talent that is still developing. Returning to the playoffs and AL Central Championship seems to be a reasonable goal. But the Tigers not only did what they expected (continuous excellence from Tarik Skubal), but hoped (first 1 picks Spencer Torkelson and Casey Mize upgrades), but they couldn’t even dream about it (Zach McKinstry’s .360 OBP).
However, one obvious place where the tiger will improve is behind the plate. Jake Rogers is an amazing defender and the batsman was poor before I looked up at his number. That said, I think his number is terrifying. They’re just bad. Rogers was one of 12 of 1200 players in just 300 or more last year. Of the 286 players who reached the game time threshold, he is in the lowest 20 in WRC+.
There are a lot of offensive sins about the defense behind the plate, but overall, the playoff teams don’t like having a guy in the roster every day, leaving them a lot of 75%. Of course, is there a way to achieve equal defense without giving up too much offense?
Good news; Dillon Dingler is here, he can do better.
Dingler has been in the Detroit system for some time. He was the No. 1 pick in the second round of Ohio State draft in 2020. (It’s a bit awkward, and the Ohio State will play in Michigan. But if the Columbus Blue Jacket can have four Michigan Wolverines at a time, the Tigers can certainly survive a Buckeyes.)
As a physically mature college prospect, I hope Dingle can move quickly, if it weren’t for meniscustomy and countless bones, he might have. This is Dingler’s sixth professional season, and he has played only 100 games. Even for the catcher, that’s not a lot, and it explains why a player who played 50 games in Double-A at the age of 22 didn’t make his debut in the profession until he was nearly 26.
Through his first 46 games in 2025, Dingler hit .296/.328/.467. His 126 WRC+ tied for third among catchers of at least 150 PA; he ranked fourth among catchers in the war, behind Cal Raleigh (many), Will Smith and Gabriel Moreno (won a tenth victory). Good company. He leads all Tigers position players, and if you add pitchers to calculus, Dingler is second in the war, behind Skubal.
Impressive, to say the least.
Dingler has already started tickling the total number of Rogers wars last season due to his bats, which is productive without putting the world on fire. There are real loopholes in Dingler’s offensive game. His plate subject is very poor. His pursuit rate is the 14th level chase rate and the 100th year walking rate. He only walked five times in 179 sets (plus three hits). He went on strike too many times. His export speed is average.
But Dingler got the value of his money. He has 12 hits this season, with an estimated distance of 275 feet or more. Eight of them have entered the pull, five of them are home runs. His aerial pull-in rate is in the front section of the league. Dingler is a very modern batsman.
But it turns out that he is like Rodgers, an amazing defensive player.
Dingler ranked seventh in this year’s franchise competition, which is very good, but not an outlier. For example, he is one-third of Austin Hedges’ lead, but it’s more than twice as far behind the plate. The framework was good at that time, but he wasn’t going to make Patrick Bailey sweat either. This is even more so when it comes to controlling the running game: Dingler’s arm is one of the strongest in the profession, but after a knee injury, he no longer posts a hit time below 1.8. That extra tenth of losses made Dingler just an average thrower, despite his shell arm.
Where he stands out is lockdown. This is a small sample so I tried not to be excited, but I was on the possibility of Dingler being the best blocking catcher we’ve ever seen, as this kind of thing has been measured.
After the meniscus injury, Dingler moved to one knee capture position. This is a big cultural war on baseball Twitter a year or two ago. I don’t know if those who were kicked out of the kid’s minor league game are still full of doubts about this approach, but it doesn’t seem to hurt Dingler’s lockdown.
According to baseball Savant, Dingler averaged 11 blocks this season. No other baseball catcher has more than six. It’s already tied for the 25th best lockdown season since 2018, with Savant having this stat in the first season. We only had one-third of the season. Dingler will pass 400 innings this weekend; the top catchers will usually log in about 1,000 innings behind the plate. Based on every game, Dingler already has its best lockdown season since 2018, with any catcher having at least 40 starts after the set.
To figure out what makes Dingler a great blocker, I looked at the man’s work. When I think of a great blocker, I think of a receiver who moves around and stays in front of the ball, but Dingler is the opposite. I was surprised that he had very few movements.
Every receiver in the league gave in to his knees at some point on the court. If there was a backstage that stayed on his toes, none of them immediately surfaced. But each catcher gets there in a different way. Adley Rutschman, JT Realmuto and Smith start with an orthodox two-point squat before putting the entire left shin on the ground in the pitcher’s finale:
The catcher who founded OKD (Dingler, Bailey, William Contreras) stretched his right knee out and spread it left and right. Here is Contreras blocking a ball in the dirt:
You can see the orthodox pose with the left leg out looking more prone to explosions – the purpose is to stand up, or step on the bike sideways to drive into a 58-foot-tall breaking ball. Rutschman’s dominant leg bent and filled, his spikes had already been dug into the dirt. Contreras looks like you’ll find in accessible public restroom stalls, and can take advantage of the help of robbing the bar.
Dingler did not get up. He suffocated it with his gloves when a ball bounced back to an inconvenient place (it looked huge by the way – reminded me to start asking the catcher about their gloves next time I go to the court). However, due to the way he sits, the ball doesn’t escape often:
Dingler’s left leg is not only a balance point. He stretched his legs in front of him, almost straightening it when he really wanted to get low. That put his butt in the dirt, leaving a five-hole small enough to cover Dingler’s gloves. He didn’t need to stack mats and slides as he turned his entire lower body into a huge dust pan, bringing all the debris from the floor to a place that could be handled easily.
There is no need to chase the ball when it is already in hand. Finally, the mountain came to Muhammad.
Dingler is by no means a perfect catcher or batsman, but he gives Tigers Rogers-class defense and Mickey Tettelton-class offense at the same time. Maybe you can’t have it all, but you can have most of it.
