BOSTON -- The brute force with which David Ortiz pulverizes a baseball is easily appreciated from any vantage point, be it a box seat behind home plate, the last row of bleachers in straightaway center field, even a rooftop garage beyond the left-field wall at Fenway Park.
But for a select few, there was nothing quite like seeing -- and hearing -- it from the proximity of the on-deck circle.
"Let me tell you something, it's like a bullet, like a gunshot," Manny Ramirez said in a phone interview with ESPN.com. "It's a sound I have heard from only two players who I have ever played with -- David and Vladimir [Guerrero].