FanHouse Ken Caminiti

MLB Power Rankings: Where MLB FanHouse's editors, writers and bloggers team up to break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world.

The second half of the season is in full swing and lo and behold if capitalism hasn't reared it's ugly head once again. Billy Beane was spun off Matt Holliday (as expected of course) and the eleventy billion dollar payroll machine that is the New York Yankees are in first place in the AL East. (Of course, that can't explain why the Mets are horrible but that's a whole other thing.)

Will the Yankees' surge be enough to propel them into the critically important No. 1 slot of the FanHouse MLB Power Rankings? Find out after the jump.

SAN DIEGO -- If there were any doubts that Kevin Towers was a baseball lifer, they were answered on his wedding day.

Just before exchanging vows with his wife in December 1996, the Padres general manager exchanged players with Tigers GM Randy Smith, a member of his wedding party.

"Any time you get baseball people together, especially general managers, regardless of what the venue is or what the situation is, baseball will come up," Towers said. "We started talking about players while we were waiting for my wife to show up. She was running a little late, so we decided to consumate a deal, about 30 minutes before our wedding vows."

Do pictures speak louder than reports? In the case of the "juiced era" of baseball, we wanted to find out. Hearing about allegations of steroid and human growth hormone use is one thing, but seeing a significant change in muscle mass, for example, is an entirely different perspective altogether. With the help of our photo editors, we dug into the archives and decided to compare what stars linked to performance-enhancing drugs looked like later in their career compared to their younger days.

The visual results are after the jump.