SpriteBatch.Draw Method

@Stephen:  it's because you're using SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack.  Use SpriteSortMode.BackToFront instead.  And in the future, post questions on the MSDN forums or stackoverflow.com, not as comments to the documentation...

I'm new to XNA but have discovered something that seems somewhat odd with this draw method, or rather a combination of calls within a batch

for context: I was writing a quick learning experiment basically a simple Arcanoid clone

I'm using .Net 4.0 if this is relevant.

Relevant Code in the Render Function is as follows

spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.LinearWrap,
DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone);

// darw main ball
spriteBatch.Draw(mainball, spritePosition, Color.White);

// draw Top HUD background
Rectangle destRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, topHUD.Height);
spriteBatch.Draw(topHUD, Vector2.Zero, destRect, Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, 1, SpriteEffects.None,0);
Vector2 ballpos = new Vector2();

// draw a small ball for each life, in the HUD area
for (int i = 0; i < Lives; i++)
{
ballpos.X = (smallBall.Width + 5) * i + 5;
ballpos.Y = 5;
spriteBatch.Draw(smallBall, ballpos, Color.White);
}
spriteBatch.End();

Now the interesting thing is this. 1 small ball comes up in front of the HUD bar and the rest behind it. Can anyone please explain the logic of this? n.b. I've tried extending the tile to a large enough basic image in case it was something to do with tiling and this makes no difference.