Dillon Dingler Snubbed Despite Leading MLB Catchers
A 3.8 fWAR, a perfect framing grade, and still left off the ballot — the clearest lesson in playing for the numbers, not the spotlight.
A week ago, Shea Langeliers was running away with the AL All-Star catcher vote, and the story was a good one — a hard-working catcher getting recognized. Then Phase 2 of the ballot came out, and Dillon Dingler wasn’t on it.
Dingler leads every qualified catcher in baseball in fWAR — wins above replacement — with a mark of 3.8. That number puts him third among all MLB position players, behind only Pete Crow-Armstrong and Bobby Witt Jr. He leads all catchers in OPS (.871) and RBI (58); his 19 home runs rank 2nd among catchers. His framing grade sits at the 100th percentile on Baseball Savant. His Fielding Run Value is in the 99th percentile. His pop time is 1.87 seconds.
None of it was enough.
Detroit Tigers manager A.J. Hinch didn’t hold back. “If Dillon Dingler’s not an All-Star,” Hinch said on 97.1 The Ticket, “then we should cancel the game.”
The game was not canceled. Dingler will not be in Philadelphia on July 14.
Phase 1 fan voting placed Langeliers first, Alejandro Kirk second, and Dingler third at 924,766 votes. Phase 2 was announced Friday, June 26, and it omitted Dingler while keeping Kirk — who was himself just getting back on his feet, easing back from a broken thumb that had cost him nearly two months. The result reflects how heavily market size and name recognition shape the fan vote.
The gap between Dingler (3.8 fWAR) and the second-place catcher Langeliers (2.2) is the same as the gap between Langeliers and the eighth-ranked catcher in baseball. That is not a photo finish. It is not a coin flip. It is one of the clearest performance advantages any position player holds in the sport — and it did not move enough fans in enough cities to keep Dingler on the ballot.
Dingler is 27. He plays in Detroit, where the Tigers are 33-44. The city is not New York. The market is not Los Angeles. His early career didn’t make the argument easy — he hit .167 in 2024, a stretch that looked, from the outside, like evidence that the 2020 second-round pick might not stick. Then 2025 happened. He won the AL Gold Glove Award, the first Tiger catcher to claim it since Iván Rodríguez in 2007 — the first Tiger player of any kind to win a Gold Glove since Ian Kinsler in 2016. Now 2026 is happening, and the stats are not subtle.
What a catcher can learn from this
The All-Star Game is decided by fans. It is also the most-watched event of the baseball midseason. Those two things coexist, and the juxtaposition — the contrast between who performs best and who gets chosen — is not a flaw. It is just how it works. Dingler’s situation is a clean example of what that costs.
Here is what fWAR means in plain language: it measures how many wins a player is worth compared to a replacement-level player — someone a team could call up from Triple-A tomorrow. A 2.0 is a solid contributor. A 3.8 in half a season is the kind of number that wins awards at the end of October.
The stat sheet does not know what city you play in. A 1.87 pop time is a 1.87 pop time whether you’re throwing in Detroit or in a sold-out stadium on the coast. A 100th-percentile framing grade means every pitch is a little more likely to be called a strike — and that is true whether or not the cameras followed you home.
What Dingler is building this season — the framing, the blocking, the power at the plate, the defense behind it — is a record. Records don’t care about market size. They accumulate whether or not anyone outside your zip code is paying attention.
Do the work. The numbers follow you even when the spotlight doesn’t.
Try this at your next practice
- The Framing Ladder. Have a coach flip soft-toss to the edges of the zone and practice “sticking” the glove without extra movement — the same still-hands discipline behind Dingler’s 100th-percentile framing grade.
- Pop-Time Log. Time your throws to second base for two weeks and track the number, regardless of who’s watching. Dingler’s 1.87 pop time didn’t happen by accident — it happened through repetition nobody filmed.
- Play for the number, not the crowd. Pick one defensive stat — blocks, framing, or pop time — and chart it daily for a month, win or lose, big crowd or empty stands.
Sources: One Stat Proves Dillon Dingler’s Dominance and Exposes All-Star Problem (Sports Illustrated) · Dillon Dingler Is the Best Catcher Nobody Is Talking About (Just Baseball) · Dissed: Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler left out AL All-Star Game Phase 2 voting (Yahoo Sports) · A.J. Hinch: Cancel the All-Star Game if Dillon Dingler isn’t in it (Audacy).
