Todd Frazier snatched a bat from his locker recently and raised the handle to his head, behind his right ear, wriggling it like a fishing rod about to be cast.

“I used to want to be like Manny Ramirez,” Frazier, the Chicago White Sox third baseman, said.

Then he flipped around to the other side of an imaginary home plate, bent at the waist and dug his feet into the clubhouse carpet, parroting the gritty style of Mo Vaughn. There was one more he wanted to show, snapping back into a right-handed setup, spreading his legs wide and lowering the bat toward his belt buckle with a fearsome scowl: Jay Buhner.

Frazier is putting up offensive numbers this season that would rival any of those former sluggers. But Frazier’s own batting stance, while technically sound and often effective, is not nearly as memorable as the ones he enthusiastically mimicked.

So it is in baseball today, where personalization at the plate appears headed the way of bullpen cars and scorecards, disappearing from a game that it once spiced. Batting stances used to identify hitters as vividly as their uniform numbers — and, sometimes, there was a good reason for that. Stan Musial used to be so coiled in the box that fans watching on television saw more of the No. 6 on Musial’s back than of the tan on his face.