Baseball is Poop

Who Got the Better of This Trade?
In the offseason the Reds traded outfielder Josh Hamilton to the Rangers for pitcher Edinson Volquez.
They might be the two best players in the majors so far this year.
Hamilton is batting .301 with 9 homers and 43 RBI (leading the AL by 10). His .909 OPS is not spectacular, only 24th in the majors, but his splits with men on base are much higher, contributing to his RBI total.
But the Reds probably got the better of the deal because pitching is so much more valuable and right now Volquez is 6-1 with a 1.12 ERA, a 1.26 WHIP and a 10.61 K/9 innings.

Smoke and Mirrors
The Tampa Bay Rays and the Florida Marlins are tied (with each other, and the Cubs) for the second best record in baseball.
The Rays payroll is $44 million, the Marlins is half that.
23 teams have higher payrolls than the Rays and Marlins, combined.
The two teams have only one pitcher in the top 25 in the majors in ERA.
Tampa Bay's best hitter, by OPS, is Eric Hinske. They don't even have a guy batting as high as .290.
So how are they doing it?
The Marlins have the excellent 1-2 combination of Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla as table setters. But they also have a bunch of guys (Mike Jacobs, Jeremy Hermida and Josh Willingham) who are driving them in. They've also been getting decent starting pitching, lots of winnable games from Scott Olsen and Mark Hendrickson, but their bullpen has been unbelievable, 5 guys with ERAs under 3.00.
And it's a similar pattern for the Rays, everyone up and down the lineup is contributing, and their starters while unspectacular are keeping them in games.
Edwin Jackson and James Shields have been good, while Andy Sonnanstine has been lucky (5-1 with a 5.07 ERA). But they also have 5 good relievers with sub-3.00 ERAs.
Usually when you have a surprise team the reason is an overwhelmingly good record in 1-run games (which is often a product of luck and usually evens out over time) but the Marlins are only 7-4 and the Rays are 4-4 in 1-run games.
Of course I don't expect either of these teams to fend off their much more talented division rivals for long but it's interesting to see for now.

Think Pink
Major League Baseball had it's annual Breast Cancer Awareness Day on Mother's Day with many players wearing pink wristbands and swinging pink bats.







The Eyes Have It
A strange sight at Dodgers games this year as a huge set of eyes stares out at the field from the outfield wall.
I'm trying to find out if this is some sort of promotional tie in for vision correction surgery.

UPDATE: The Dodgers got back to me with an entirely unsatisfactory answer. They say they put the eyes of a couple players on the the outfield walls during their at bats, specifically Chin Lung-Hu.




Cool Picture of the Week
Fans go for a foul ball.