Dillon Dingler’s collapse at the plate has become one of the strangest storylines in the Tigers’ season, especially because it came right after he looked like one of their most reliable hitters.
Through the Tigers’ game against the Mariners that day, Dingler was sitting on a .278 average with an .877 OPS, 26 homers and 78 RBI. He had also gone deep for the third time in three days, and he’d been one of the few steady offensive forces during Detroit’s miserable 6-22 May. Behind the plate, he was doing damage too.
For a stretch, the MVP talk wasn’t completely absurd. Aaron Judge had been out for more than three months, which left Yordan Alvarez as the clear favorite, but Dingler had at least put himself in the spoiler conversation if he could keep raking down the stretch. Alvarez, though, has kept his Triple Crown chase rolling, while Dingler has vanished.
The slide has been brutal. The day after Flaherty’s tweet, Dingler went 8-for-80 the rest of the month.
He then needed 29 days to homer again. Entering play on Friday, he was batting .144 with a .395 OPS since Aug.
The simplest explanation has been fatigue. At his peak, AJ Hinch was even using Dingler at DH on days when he wasn’t catching. Still, Dingler isn’t buying the idea that overwork is the reason.
" I don't want to blame it on fatigue," he said. "I don't want to blame it on anything. It's just something I wish I could have gotten out of sooner."
He added, "Sometimes you're really hot. Sometimes you're really cold. It's a weird game."
Hinch, meanwhile, sounded more focused on figuring out what changed than on assigning blame.
"There's flashes in there of performance, albeit not as dominant as the first half. My question is more, 'What can we do better?'
Or what (are the) signals of him being banged up a little bit? Or just the rigors of the position, what could we do better to help him?"
The Tigers have rarely had a catcher who could truly carry the lineup with power, and the last one who fits that description, arguably, is Hall of Famer Pudge Rodríguez. That has long set the bar low offensively at the position, but Dingler raised expectations before this downturn.
His slump, paired with Riley Greene’s IL stint, lined up with Detroit’s August slide. The Tigers’ offense has been especially vulnerable without those two, and Greene had to work through his own learning curve between 2025 and 2026. Now it’s Dingler’s turn to sort through this one ahead of 2027.
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