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LOS ANGELES – Dante Bichette, the Colorado Rockies' rookie hitting coach, was endeavoring to explain how Wilin Rosario reminds him of Manny Ramirez, how innate bat speed meets God-granted power meets some other mystical denomination.

Rosario himself sat 20 feet away, rolling the handle of a bat from one hand to the other.

These are elastic conversations, given the length one must travel to see one of the great right-handed hitters of his generation – maybe the greatest before Miguel Cabrera came along – in a 24-year-old, 5-foot-11, 220-pound catcher whose hero growing up in Bonao, Dominican Republic was, indeed, Manny Ramirez.

No matter that the young, stubby catcher, in 155 big-league games, or what amounts to one big-league season, has 38 home runs, more than any catcher since his September 2011 debut. No matter that Rosario, batting .329 when the Rockies arrived near exhaustion (their flight was delayed several hours in Phoenix the night before and arrived at about 3 a.m. Monday morning) to Dodger Stadium on Monday, already had six home runs and 16 RBIs while serving as a member of the chorus to Troy Tulowitzki's and Carlos Gonzalez's leads.

"He's got a chance to be one of the greats," Bichette said. "I hate to throw that on him but he's got a lot of wisdom for a young kid. Really, there's some wisdom behind everything he does."





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Here it came …

"When I watch his game, I see a young Manny Ramirez-type hitter," Bichette said.

In the front-yard games with his mom, Crusita, Rosario as a boy always was Manny, who was from Santo Domingo, just an hour drive's south on Autopista Duarte. Crusita was a softball player, and a good one, so she'd throw him batting practice and he'd take his big swings, and then she'd go watch him play with the other boys in town. And so, it would seem, there are mystical denominations to be found in a doting mother with a good, loose arm.

"She feels happy," Rosario had said, "when I hit a home run when I was little. First, God gave us everything. But then I got it from her."

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A notable right-handed hitter himself in his day, Bichette further tried to explain this Manny Ramirez comparison. How the good ones keep their hands inside the baseball but without over-thinking it. How they simply react at a spark of recognition. How the reaction comes before the thought, or as the thought itself.

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