Dillon Dingler no doubt needed a break that night on Aug. 4 of last season as his Double-A Erie team tussled in a game against the Harrisburg Senators.
A break, that is, meaning a breather — or, some good fortune after a stretch of bad times. It had been a long 2021 season. Making minor-league life even longer, Dingler was having relationship issues with his bat in the six weeks since he had been promoted from high Single-A West Michigan.
But a break, yes. A break — not a fracture, which, unfortunately for him, is what he got when a foul tip from a pitch thrown by Joe Navilhon caromed against the second finger of his left hand in the seventh inning of a game at FNB Field.
Dingler was gone for a month as his hand healed. Once reunited with the SeaWolves for a 14-game season closeout, the hitting gremlins returned. He struck out five times in his final eight at-bats, finishing his 50-game stint at Erie with a .202 batting average, .264 on-base percentage, and .578 OPS. He whiffed 62 times in 208 plate appearances (a somber 30% rate).
They were not the numbers expected from a superb former Ohio State athlete, now 23, who just happens to be ranked as the Tigers’ top catching prospect. The first player snagged in the second round of the 2020 MLB Draft had been viewed by Tigers intelligentsia as a future everyday big-league option — perhaps by 2023.
“I was fortunate enough to have a pretty good start-up at West Michigan,” Dingler said Monday during a Zoom interview session. “But, as the season went on, in my opinion, it just kind of went downhill.”
So, some questions:
Can a right-handed hitter who did just fine at West Michigan in a 32-game warm-up to Erie (.287/.376/.549), with a meaty .925 OPS and eight home runs, re-set himself for 2022?
Or, was there something about Double-A ball, with its widely acknowledged bluer-chip pitching, that hints at trouble ahead?
Dingler and the Tigers have some advice for critics: Give him time. Give him a full season, two years out of college, to settle in with his bat, especially when his position — catcher — demands such energy and classroom-caliber focus.
“Be patient with him,” said Arnie Beyeler, who was manager last season at Erie and who now is a roving Tigers minor-league instructor. “We all know that’s a tough position, catcher, and yet I think he’s in a good place.
“He’s got to hit a little bit — we know that. But, again, it’s tough. He hit the first couple of weeks with us (11-for-33 in his first eight games, a .333 average), but then some of the guys (pitchers) adjusted to him. And it’s funny how it all snowballs. Next thing, guys who’ve never been through that — buddies — start to ask, ‘What’s wrong?’
“Well, nothing’s wrong. You’re hitting the ball hard, maybe they’re not falling in, and then it starts to dogpile. We forget how hard this game is. You’ve got to step back.”
Dingler buys Beyeler’s summary — all the way.
In fact, he says, Double A definitely is the heavy leap in talent that baseball savants always have said is particularly elevated among all of baseball’s farm-team trials.
“The pitching, especially,” Dingler said, speaking from his apartment at Lakeland, Florida, where he is working out at the TigerTown complex, waiting on orders for when spring camp might open as MLB owners and players haggle over a new contract.
“Guys’ stuff broke a little more, fastballs have a little different movement, and the biggest thing — for me — was the percentage of off-speed pitches that went up.
“Instead of 70, 80% fastballs, now guys (at Double A) are using their fastball as their second pitch. It was just so different from what I had been used to. I wouldn’t say it was curveballs as far as breaking pitches as much as sliders. Sliders at that level are tighter, faster, they’re better-controlled.”
He remembers a series at Akron when he saw not only back-end bullpen arms firing heaters at 98, but again, those swerving sliders that veered in a flash. “They’d finish up, hitting 98, but also have a 50% slider rate,” Dingler said. “So, you’ve got to be ready for a fastball at that velocity and still react to a slider. Traditionally, I actually lay off fastballs up in the zone. But I’d fish once in a while. That’s the (Double-A) level you’re now playing at.”
Dingler is 6-foot-3, 210 pounds, and is fleet enough to have played some center field at Ohio State.
The Tigers have bet on his athleticism since that evening in June 2020 when they snagged him with the second round’s first turn. They were saying, aloud, a cold-weather player who hadn’t played as many games, nor had the summer-league file, to match most early-round picks, would be their future at catcher.
Defensively, he’s adding finesse to a fundamentally strong package that includes a power arm.
Beyeler has said since last summer that the jump in Double-A sophistication — especially in handling a pitching staff — makes it tough on any catcher to focus on hitting in the manner other position players can apply to their offense.
“I saw it in my years with the Red Sox,” said Beyeler, who from 2007-10 managed Boston’s Double-A club at Portland, Maine. “These guys would be world-beaters, then come to Double A and hit a wall for a while.
“With that catching position, there’s so much on your plate. And even more now, with all the advanced reports thrown at them. You’ve got to study all day, look at video all day. Mentally, they can’t get away from the position’s requirements.”
Dingler nods and all but sighs. Beyeler just nailed it.
“It comes with the territory,” Dingler said. “As a catcher, you’ve got to be polished, you have to prove to your staff — your starter, your bullpen — that you’re always going to be there for them. That in a big situation you’re going to make the block, that you’re going to make the right (pitch) call, that with the pitch-count, it’s merely a suggestion you’re putting down — and yet you’ve got to make sure they’ve got confidence that pitch will work.”
Is it any wonder then that there were issues with the bat last summer? If there is even a hint at an excuse there, Dingler isn’t buying.
“It’s one of those things,” he said, explaining that the worst thing a catcher can do is allow his defense to slip when his hitting is stressed. “You can’t be slipping in both departments. That’s when hard decisions are going to be made about your career.”
He paused. Dingler had a post-script for all this baseball introspection.
“I’m a hard-headed guy,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘Catchers are defense-first and hitting’s a plus.’ Well, I want to be both.”
Everyone’s expectation is that 2022 will be Dingler’s settle-down season. That’s his view as he works out at Lakeland, spending much of the day at the TigerTown complex, funneling the usual array of physical workouts, hitting and catching sessions, all spiced with high-tech study sessions, into a routine he hopes will have him primed for what figures to be a return to Erie.
“You’d love to be able to flip a switch,” Beyeler said, speaking of what might be expected wherever Dingler lands. “It’s the old, ‘We need this guy ready in two years, we need him to show this in six months’ — sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
“But definitely with a guy like D (Dingler), this is a young man with a great work ethic who’s a great athlete.
“I’d definitely put my money on him.”
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and former Detroit News sports reporter.