Dillon Dingler Demonstrates Delightful Distinction

For four years now I have been informing every Dillon (or Dylan) I meet of the existence of a Tigers catching prospect called Dillon Dingler. If you know too much about baseball, you have to talk to the well-adjusted about it at least occasionally. Even if you have perfect self control, and never annoy people with the stupid shit they don’t care about (couldn’t be me), people still sometimes just want to know what it is you’re spending all that time learning about, and you have to have something ready for them. Fun facts are good, but there are only so many that are actually understandable by agnostics. Dillon Dingler, on the other hand, is worth knowing about on every level.

Dingler is a 26-year-old playing his first full season for a shockingly good Tigers squad that’s winning more than anyone else in the Majors. To begin, his name is very funny. And, by the way, Dillon is his middle name! He chose to aliterate with the last name Dingler! But he has a signature quirk beyond his literal signature: He is allergic to taking a walk. In 27 games last year, his incessant swinging was a liability at the plate for the Tigers. But 2025, though it’s still early, is looking like a breakout for Dingler. Scouts have always loved his defense, and now he’s rocking a nice 126 WRC+ to go with that glove.

Pretty good, right? Sure, but there’s a blatant red flag: Dingler has a .379 BABIP. I’ve spent a lot of time explaining BABIP to people slowly and badly, but recently I saw Mike Petriello describe it as batting average without strikeouts or home runs. In modern times, a BABIP over .350 almost always constitutes unsustainable luck. If it doesn’t, it means that a guy has a terrifically unusual approach to making contact or puts incredible power into every batted ball he hits. For a while, my mane man Jorge Alfaro had the highest career BABIP of any active player, because while he almost never hit anything, the ball tended to go pretty far pretty fast if he did, and he was pretty fast if it didn’t go far. Dingler’s power isn’t like Alfaro’s, however.

Another explanation for a high BABIP is a singular technique where a guy gets hits, without home runs or walks, by swinging the bat very slowly. It’s just really hard to get away with that for a whole career these days. Petriello namedrops Rod Carew as an example of a guy who did, and his spiritual successor is Luis Arráez. The Padres first baseman swings slower than anyone and hardly ever walks, but he still manages to strike out less often than he takes a free base. Is Dingler like Luis Arráez? No. Dingler’s bat speed is exactly average, which means he is closer to Giancarlo Stanton than Arráez.

So it’s just luck then, right? Well … no. Luck merchants have a big gap between their actual batting stats and their expected outcomes, based on launch angle and exit velocity. 2019 Yoán Moncada had an insane .409 BABIP, which took a .282 xBA and turned it into a .315 BA. Dingler has a gap, but it’s only eight points to Moncada’s 33. There is some luck here, but the potential future regression shouldn’t be enough on its own to turn Dingler into a benchwarmer.

At this point, we are absolutely sure something is up; get a load of this leaderboard. Dingler is 35th out of 256 qualified guys. There are two buckets of guys here: Guys who strike out never, and guys who beat the pine tar out of the ball. Many are in both. Only one is in neither.

So if we’ve ruled out skill, technique, and luck, what is left? Well, there’s the fourth option, but its never the fourth option.

The fourth option is magic. The fourth option is Tim Anderson.

The White Sox shortstop baffled every baseball analyst under the sun for four calendar years and 1641 plate appearances. From 2019 through 2022, he ran a BABIP of .376. The explanation, we said, was simply that he pulled a lot of grounders to the left side that he could beat out with his speed. Anderson went from an All-Star in 2022 at age 29 to literally unplayable in 2023, at age 30. He lost a foot per second on his home-to-first and all those former hits became outs, instantly. Case cracked, right? Well, not quite. Anderson’s decline also happened because he used to hit a really good amount of line drives, and in 2023 he lost a tick on his swing timing, too. His bat is relatively very vertical as it moves through the zone, so when he gets to a ball a tick late, the resulting launch angle is altered much more than if it were flat. His later swings started pounding more balls into the dirt, up the middle instead of to the left side. Anderson didn’t just stop beating balls out; he was also hitting significantly fewer balls that were easy to beat out, as well as hitting fewer of the balls you don’t have to beat out at all.

This is the magic that Anderson had and then lost: His regular swing plane and timing just sort of happened to dump balls into this perfect area for him.

In the case of Dingler, he appears to be The Tim Anderson Thing all over again. He has a very vertical swing tilt, virtually identical to Anderson, and he has a great feel for hitting the launch angle sweet spot. As Anderson hopefully knows, the timing on exceptionally vertical swings is very tight, so if you are super consistent with your launch angles, it means you have extremely consistent timing. The only guys with steeper swings and better sweet spot percentages either never make contact or are literally Freddie Freeman. Dingler’s not making a living on his speed, but he is dumping plenty of hits into that specific area right in front of the outfielders. For as long as he can keep this up, that BABIP shouldn’t be something to worry about.

Sometimes, the answer is just Tim Anderson.