Dillon Dingler: Statcast edition

Some AFL statcast data analysis continues. This time is Dillon Dingler

Season stats and quick overview

Dillon Dingler
2022 AFL season stats: 13 PA, .500/.692/.500, 0 HRs, 4BB:2K, 1.192 OPS, 1 year older than average with rest of league

Dillon Dingler didn’t have a lot to work with, which makes the analysis pretty hard. You don’t want to jump to an conclusions on small sample sizes, or in the case extremely small sample sizes. As you can see, he had only 13 PA for the entirety of the AFL. Luckily, all 13 of those PA have data we can take a look at and play with. Even still, there were a few stats that stood out to me.

Batted Balls

In the 13 PA logged, he saw 57 pitches, which is good for 4.4 pitchers per plate appearance, the MLB as a whole averaged 3.9. Let’s look at all the pitches he saw:

Of his 57 pitches seen, 35 pitches (61.4%) were outside or in zones 11-14:

22 called balls (62.8%)
7 fouls (20%)
3 swinging strikes (8.6%)
2 balls in dirt (5.7%)
1 HBP (2.9%)

Most of the foul balls (5 of the 7) were on the edge of the strike zone, so it wasn’t him freely swinging at pitches far outside. There were 27 pitches far outside of even zones 11-14, Dingler swung at 4 of them, missing only one. 

4 walks in 13 PA is seemingly really good, but this also isn’t anything new for Dingler. He had 3+ walks over 13-15 PAs on 8 separate occasions between 5/24 and 9/4 in AA, where he ended the year with a 10.0% BB% — despite not getting his 4th walk until his 66th PA. 

Also unsurprising is Dingier hitting only singles in this AFL season. Of the 6 balls he put into play, none had a launch angle over 15° and he averaged only 4.3° overall. His four hits he collected were all to the pull, with three of those hits coming against fastballs far inside.

Both outs made on him with balls in play were some weakly hit balls up the middle. Disappointingly, one of those was a fastball in the heart of the plate:

Final thoughts and defensive notes

Defensively, he caught one of eight would-be base stealers and had no passed balls.  Again, given the extremely small sample size, it’s hard to come to any definite conclusions. So much can change over time and it would have been great to see more playing time for him. At least we got to see some visuals in place though.