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Before the season started, the Detroit Tigers were the popular pick amongst baseball fans and experts alike as the eventual World Series champion. After adding Miguel Cabrera to a potent lineup that already included hitters like Magglio Ordonez, Gary Sheffield, Carlos Guillen, Curtis Granderson, and Ivan Rodriguez, there was talk that the Tigers would score 1,000 runs this season.

Who knew they'd need to? Though most people were aware that the Detroit bullpen would be a problem area, I don't think anybody thought they would be as bad as they have been in 2008. So now here we sit on August 7th, and the Tigers find themselves in a tailspin.

After building up some momentum in recent weeks to get back into the AL Central race, the Tigers have now lost six in a row to fall three games under .500. They're also on the verge of being swept by the division leading Chicago White Sox and falling 9.5 games out of first place, which could effectively end any hope they have of playing this October.

So will the Tigers pull the plug on their season tonight, or are they going to rise up and start mauling people again? Find out after the jump.

Our MLB editor provides weekly dispatches from major league games in Notes From the Clubhouse.

The Tigers have done a nice job of recovering from a wretched start to the season. Expected to be a 1,000-run juggernaut, Detroit stumbled out of the gate, losing its first seven game and going 23-32 over the first two months. Entering play Saturday, the Tigers stand at 48-48. While they aren't expected to drop back below .500 for the rest of the season, the Tigers have a long way to go to catch up with the Twins and White Sox in the AL Central.

Maybe that's why both utilityman Brandon Inge and reliever Fernando Rodney are sporting brand new buzzcuts today. Detroit needs that extra push in the second half. Sure a reliable starting pitcher would go a lot farther in helping the Tigers' chances, but a new hairstyle can't hurt can it?

Who better than manager Jim Leyland, ever the gruff kidder, to comment on the new locks sported by his players?

"There's something wrong with Inge," joked Leyland before Saturday night's game in Baltimore. "He's [expletive] rowing with one oar."

"He has a good time and he plays his ass off," added Leyland in a moment of candor about Inge, who, after losing his starting role this winter, has played all over the place this season and been extremely valuable to Leyland.

As for Rodney, who is holding onto his shorn locks so he can show his mother, Leyland had a few more wisecracks. "If he shaves that [expletive] goatee, he'll look even better," said the Tigers manager. "The [expletive] shampoo will finally get to his head."

Will all this actually help Detroit? Who knows? But for a team that faced high expectations and still has a big hole to climb out of, the Tigers appear to be an awfully loose bunch.

Maybe the All-Star Game is a meaningless to the players and just an excuse for Bud Selig to admire himself for a week. That doesn't mean that the selections should be stupid. Today, the MLB 'Haus gives you All-Star Grievances.

Grievance: Jermaine Dye not making the team. I swear in recent weeks I've become Jermaine Dye's publicist telling anybody who will listen that he is far and away the most undervalued outfielder in the game today. Still, I thought enough people knew about him to at least get him on to the All Star team. JD is hitting .308 and OPSing (not sure that's a word, but screw it, I'm angry) at .919 with 19 homers and 52 RBI. His only crime is that he plays in the American League where outfielders are raking this season, and that people still think the Yankees are good.

Grievance: Lack of White Sox pitchers and Joe Crede's selection. Now I'm probably going to come off as sounding like a bit of a homer here, but there just aren't enough White Sox on the team this season. They're in first place in their division, and lead the league in pitching, yet their only All Stars are Carlos Quentin and Joe Crede. While Quentin deserves the nod, Evan Longoria should have gotten Crede's spot. Also, as I mentioned, the Sox lead the league in pitching, yet not a single member of their pitching staff made the team. Does that make sense to you? Gavin Floyd is 10-4 with a 3.22 ERA and a WHIP of 1.12, John Danks is only 6-4 (it's not his fault the Sox average about .00003 runs every time he starts) but has an ERA of 2.52 and WHIP of 1.17. How neither of them make the team baffles me.

Grievance: Jason Varitek as the third catcher over A.J. Pierzynski. Great, another White Sox player. I know, I know, but if you look at the rest of the teams from the AL Central, everybody that deserved to be on the team is on the team (you could argue Carlos Guillen doesn't deserve his spot, but what other Tiger takes his place?). The Sox are the only team in the division to really get screwed here. Anyway, Varitek was chosen by his fellow players over Pierzynski even though he's only hitting .218/.300/.358 with seven homers and 27 runs driven in. Pierzynski, on the other hand, is hitting .296/.333/.442 with seven homers and 33 RBI. Oh, and he's the guy calling all the pitches for the pitching staff with the lowest ERA in baseball. Obviously, his personality is what cost him here, which is idiotic. Is the American League looking to win this game or hang out with friends?

As Mr. Watson told you yesterday, the Seattle Mariners finally went ahead and did what we'd all been waiting for them to do for a few weeks now: they fired general manager Bill Bavasi. In other words, Monday was probably the best day that Seattle sports fans have had in a while, and a cause for celebration.

With the pending move of the Sonics, and the Mariners struggles this season, there hasn't been much to cheer about in the Emerald City lately. Still, while there's some debate in New York about the Mets firing Willie Randolph (was it deserved? did they go about it the right way? etc.), I don't think there's much debate amongst Mariners fans about how they feel for this move. If they're upset about anything, it's probably that Bavasi was the only one to go and that the team can't fire Richie Sexson.

As Watson mentioned in his post yesterday, Bavasi's tenure in Seattle is not one littered with success. He gave questionable contracts to Sexson, Carlos Silva, and Adrian Beltre (though I think Beltre has been a good addition to the club), actually gave Jeff Weaver $8 million to suck for a season, and made trades like sending Carlos Guillen to Detroit for Ramon Santiago. Those are some devastating moves, and yet, that's only part of what Bavasi did to help bring this organization down.

June is here so it's well past time for the Detroit Tigers to write anything off to a slow start. It's getting later and later and if they're going to make a charge for the division title, it has to start right away. That means doing anything possible to get their best team on the field, even if it means moving Carlos Guillen for the third time since the end of last season.

Guillen moved from short to first full-time to accomodate Edgar Renteria after the trade bringing him to Detroit from Atlanta. Then they moved him to third when Miguel Cabrera's errant fielding made the hot corner too toasty for comfort. Now Guillen is moving to leftfield, starting with today's game against Seattle, so that Jim Leyland can get Brandon Inge's power and excellent glove into the lineup a little more often.

He did say that the move wouldn't be permanent but the manager is running out of ways to jumpstart his team. He's dropped Cabrera in the lineup and rejiggered the defense but nothing has worked. The biggest reason why is that none of those moves has to do with the three-fifths of the rotation currently posting ERAs north of five. Unless Justin Verlander, Kenny Rogers and Nate Robertson start turning in effective starts consistently, nothing in the lineup will help the Tigers climb out of the ditch they've dug themselves.

You know, this baseball season started out with some pretty odd, and no doubt, painful injuries. First we heard the tragic tale of Felix Pie and his twisted testicle, and that story was followed shortly with the epic battle between Kaz Matsui and the evil anal fissures.

Since then, though, we've had nothing but the same old boring hamstring and sore shoulder injuries. That is until Jim Leyland explained the problems his third baseman Carlos Guillen has been having after he committed two errors on Tuesday night.

"He can hardly move -- he's got hemorrhoids so bad," Tigers manager Jim Leyland said Tuesday. "He's been playing with hemorrhoids that probably need to be lanced. He probably shouldn't have been out there (third base on Monday)."

Leyland said the hemorrhoids have been bothering Guillen for about four or five days, but they have gotten worse in the last few days. "He could hardly walk (Monday night)," Leyland said.

And with that, we now know more about Carlos' ass than I think we ever hoped to. Thanks, Jim.

I've never had hemorrhoids myself, so I can't say for sure how painful they actually are, but anytime you need to have anything lanced, it doesn't sound like much fun. Looking on the bright side, maybe Guillen can spin this whole thing into an endorsement for Preparation H. "Hello, I'm Detroit Tigers third baseman Carlos Guillen, and when I play baseball I like to make sure my butt feels nice. Sitting on that hard wooden bench between innings can really tear a man's booty up, and that's why I never come to the ballpark without my Preparation H with cooling gel."

The commercial would then show Carlos hitting a home run and as he crosses the plate to high five his teammates, he gets a slap on the ass from Ivan Rodriguez before turning towards the camera, flashing a smile, winking, and giving a thumbs up.

The Mariners will be finishing up a six-game road trip this afternoon at Yankee Stadium, and they'll be hoping to avoid going 0-6. Still, you have to wonder, despite the fact that they haven't won a game on this trip, do they really even want to go back home to Seattle? At least while they're in New York, the home fans can't kill them, so they're safer on the road.

There's probably also some fear in manager John McLaren and general manager Bill Bavasi that they may not hold those titles for much longer. The fans wouldn't exactly cry themselves to sleep at night knowing those two were gone, and they may be getting their wish soon as both have received the dreaded votes of confidence from team president Chuck Armstrong.

"Their positions are secure," Armstrong told MLB.com from his Bellevue, Wash., home. "They are not to be blamed for what's going on.

"In my 23 years, I have never ever seen anything like this. We saw it the other way in 2001. I mean, you have to ask yourself, 'How did the Mariners win 116 games that season with that roster, compared to this roster?' This is just as inexplicable the other way."

While coming into the 2008 season, the lineup in the AL Central that everybody seemed to be falling in love with was the Detroit Tigers, and it was hard to blame anybody for doing so. I mean, Magglio Ordonez, Curtis Granderson, Carlos Guillen, Gary Sheffield, and they added Miguel Cabrera? Damn. While I was interested in seeing what kind of astronomical numbers Detroit's lineup could produce, I was also pretty interested to see what the Cleveland Indians could do.

After all, this was a lineup that scored 811 runs last season, and did so without any real help from their big masher, Travis Hafner. I figured that Pronk had just had a down year in 2007, and that this year he would return to the form that saw him get MVP consideration in 2006.

That's not the case so far. After Cleveland's extra-inning victory over the Mariners on Thursday night, Hafner finds himself hitting .221/.314/.365. Those numbers are well below his career averages of .287/.394/.544. He's still driving in runs, as he does have 17 RBI already, but his lack of hitting has caused manager Eric Wedge to drop Pronk from the third spot in the order to the sixth.

"I feel like this young man is going to get back to where he needs to get to," Wedge said. "It's going to take a little bit of time and a lot of work. [Hitting coach] Derek Shelton and I have spent a lot of time together, and Derek has spent a lot of time with Travis talking about this. We're going to get him there and he's going to get himself there. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when."

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing matchups

Los Angeles Angels (12-9) at Boston Red Sox (15-7)- 7:05 PM ET
I swear these teams have met like 100 years in a row in the playoffs (OK, it's like twice, or three times, I can't remember), which makes this regular season match up all the more interesting. Well, that and most of the other games tonight are crap.

Tonight's game is interesting because of the pitching matchup between Daisuke Matsuzaka and Jon Garland. Dice-K's cruising so far at 4-0 with 28 strikeouts in 28 and 2/3 innings and a 3.14 ERA. It makes me wish I told more people about my pre-season premonition that he was going to break out and challenge for the Cy Young this year, but what can I say, I don't like it when people laugh at me. Garland was the Angels big off-season acquisition and with all eyes turned towards him in hopes that he could step up in the absence of Kelvim Escobar and John Lackey, he's been pretty bad, turning in a 4.81 ERA and a 1.64 WHIP. The Angels will need him to step it up if they want to avoid the ignominy of losing the division to a team that traded away it's best hitter and pitcher in the off-season.

Miguel Cabrera may have a shiny, new contract, but that doesn't mean he's the Tigers' third basemen of the future. In fact, if you believe Jim Leyland, Cabrera doesn't have any future at third base: the skipper announced after Tuesday's win that Cabrera was switching positions with Carlos Guillen, who was just getting comfortable at first base after playing shortstop his entire career.

The decision is a bit of a shock, but it makes perfect sense: Cabrera's fielding (specifically his range) has always been suspect, especially as his waistband has grown tighter the last few years. It's possible the Tigers always contemplated a change but wanted to give Cabrera an honest chance to prove himself. After five committing five errors at the position, he failed to do so. Guillen should be better, even if he sometimes struggles with his throws to first.

Cabrera has previously stated that he'd prefer to stay at third base, but that may have just been because that's where he'd be able to command the most dollars as a free agent. Perhaps because his future (and his children's future, and his children's children's future ...) is secure with an eight-year $153 million contract, he seems to be fine with the move.