Opinion

As we all know, yesterday we all celebrated Mother's Day. Since all 30 teams had scheduled games, making a day to spend with their mothers impossible, Major League Baseball had something different in mind.

The MLB has been issuing pink bats on Mother's Day for some time now, but I feel that it has never meant more than this year. It is not only a great thing to do for Major League ballplayers, but it has become a fashion statement.

In the brave new world of the steroids era, nobody is above suspicion in organized baseball.

Not when five of the top 12 all-time fence busters (Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, and Alex Rodriguez) are suspected of amassing their home-run totals under questionable circumstances.

Not when the pitcher who's ranked ninth in career wins, Roger Clemens, may forever have to pay the admission price to Cooperstown when he wants in.

In the wake of the 50-game suspension handed down to Major League Baseball star Manny Ramirez, children are left scratching their collective head trying to decide which professional athletes to look up to.

Barry Bonds posters once pinned to cork board walls have been torn down and replaced by Alex Rodriguez's poster, only to be torn down and replaced with Ramirez's, only to be torn down and....

The San Francisco Giants were never expected to tear the cover off the ball coming into the 2009 season. There were reasons to be optimistic, but they were never expected to be a team that would improve a little bit.

Well, that hasn't really happened.

The Giants are currently the lowest-scoring team in Major League Baseball by a pretty good amount. Even a trip to Coors Field saw the Giants struggle to score runs on two of three occasions.

Big Money has been money

Paul Maholm is arguably not a front-of-the-rotation starter. Ian Snell is certainly not a No. 2 starter, even on the weak Pirates staff. That's one reason why the Pirates have lost the last few games. But that may be exactly the point.

Zach Duke and Ross Ohlendorf are decidedly better than the average three and four starters, and Jeff Karstens is a legitimate No. 5. These pitchers are "coming up," bringing the Pirates to the "better" part of a still-questionable rotation.

The first thing the Milwaukee Brewers general manager said to the media about Ryan Braun upon his call-up in 2007 was, "he is a very confident young man."

In the two years since, no one is disputing that claim by Melvin.

Ryan Braun won the NL Rookie of the Year in 2007, despite missing the first six weeks of the season while still in Triple-A Nashville. He followed that up last season with MVP-type numbers and led the Brewers to their first playoff appearance since 1982.

More than a month into the season the Blue Jays have seen 3 pitchers make their MLB debut and are still on top of the AL East, the toughest division in baseball. How have they done it? The Jays came off a terrible offensive year in 2008, and the line-up did not change that much.
What did change is Cito Gaston is back, and so is hitting coach Gene Tenace. With them they brought an approach that the entire team has bought into, going to every at bat with a plan. It sounds simple enough but the proof is there, the Jays averaged a run more under Gaston than Gibbons in 2008.

The Detroit Tigers are having fun, and the fans are taking notice.

Coming off of their disastrous 2008 campaign, most prognosticators and fans alike had low expectations heading into 2009.  Most baseball people predicted that the Tigers would finish near the bottom of the American League Central.

Looking back on my days as a recruiter that specialized in placing candidates in the accounting field I will always remember one candidate’s quote that “the numbers tell a story” and regardless of what you are being told the “numbers do not lie”. 

With that said,