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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.

With 64 games to go, the ledger is even for the Detroit Tigers. They leave Baltimore at 49-49 -- no small feat considering they were nine games below .500 at the end of May. Still, Jim Leyland's club has a long way to go to live up to the lofty preseason expectations placed upon them.

The Tigers trail the Twins by six games and the White Sox by 6 1/2 in the AL Central, and with the way the Rays, Red Sox and Yankees are playing, the wild card probably isn't an option. Resurrections aren't unheard of in the three-division era. Just look at the Phillies last year or the 2005 Astros, who were 36-41 on July 1, but ended up qualifying for the playoffs.

But those teams had horses and they had a bit of magic too (or mojo or just good fortune, whatever you want to call it). The Phillies had an irrepressible offense led by Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard and won 13 of their final 17 games. The Astros had a formidable three-headed monster in Roger Clemens, Roy Oswalt and Andy Pettitte and they won games 8-6, 12-8 and 7-6 down the stretch when they weren't stifling opposing teams with their pitching.

Unfortunately for Leyland, it doesn't look like this edition of the Tigers has the horses or the spark to mount a comeback.

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."

Curtis Granderson -- Warm-up time, apparently, is for suckers. So are allergies. Granderson got plugged right into a Tigers lineup that is heating up and picked up the pace himself. Over the last seven days, he's hitting .350/.500/1.050 with three homers, six walks and three RBI. No stolen bases. I know. Sad, right? You'll live.
Justin Upton -- A very, very, very strong buy. Upton came out gangbusters, but obviously it wasn't going to last all season long. And over the last week he's hitting .143/.208/.190. He's not going to get any cheaper than this all season.

For anyone with allergies, it's a tough time to be in the Midwest. Everything's blooming and dusty, leading to swollen eyes and scratchy throats and an unspeakable excess of phlegm. It's totally disgusting.

Guess what? Professional baseball players feel the pain, too. Just take Curtis Granderson, whose allergies have officially surpassed his injured hand on the scale of things that annoy him (via MLBTR):

For the most part the hand is feeling okay, the body and everything is struggling, my allergies are killing me right now, just trying to fit in and fall back into place, just getting at-bats.

I empathize, and I spend most of my working hours in modern, climate-controlled buildings. Curtis spends his working hours in the midst of dust and grass and pollen in major league outfields. Yep ... that could get pretty irritating.

Anyway, it's great to see that baseball players are just like you and me. Except for the wild, excessive wealth. That's a main difference.

One theory for the slow start the Detroit Tigers offense has experienced this season was that they were struggling because they didn't have their spark plug at the top of the order. Curtis Granderson has been busy nursing a broken hand that's kept him out of action all season, but the hand has healed and Grandy has been on a minor-league rehab assignment since Friday.

In the three games Granderson has played in the minors, the hand doesn't seem to be bothering him too much, as he's hitting .385. Though Curtis isn't worried as much about his hand, which he says feels fine, as getting back in game shape.

"That's the one thing I'm struggling with right now," Granderson said. "There's nothing you can do to simulate game situations. You've got to be out there."

For Tigers fans wondering when they're going to get to see Curtis "out there" and patrolling centerfield in Comerica Park, it could be as soon as Wednesday against the Texas Rangers. He's scheduled to play at least one more game with the Toledo Mud Hens on Tuesday night, but depending on how that goes, and how he feels afterwards, he'll likely be boarding a plane to Detroit.

Whether or not his return will be the spark plug the Tigers have been waiting for (Did he by chance learn to pitch on his rehab assignment?), well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Curtis Granderson may favor the old school fashion of wearing his socks high, but that doesn't make him a traditionalist. In his blog at ESPN, he was asked to describe his perfect stadium, and he included some features sure to make the old school cringe, including "a rollercoaster visible in the stadium" as well as some new between-innings entertainment:

Last but not least, cheerleaders or dancers. Winter leagues have them, the Marlins have them and every level of basketball and football has them (from pee wee to the pros), so why not baseball? There's nothing else going on between innings. Oh yeah, and no organs. Only a new, up-to-date sound system to play all types of music throughout the game.

Cheerleaders at a baseball game? Blasphemous! Or ... maybe not. Several big league teams have already added them (pictured above are the Braves' cheerleaders) and they're quite common in both the minor leagues as well as foreign leagues.

I'm not going to go into everything that's wrong with the Tigers right now, as their problems are pretty obvious to any baseball fan that cares to look. They can't score, and they can't keep their opponent from scoring. It's the type of equation that leads to 2-10 records and manager blowups.

What I want to know is when it's safe to pronounce the Tigers as dead.

It seems that no matter where you look, there's somebody saying that while the Tigers are off to a horrid start it's still too early to abandon all hope with this team. After all, they've only played 12 of the 162 games on their schedule. I'm one of those people as well, but if you'll allow me to play devil's advocate for a bit here, why is everybody so afraid to say what seems to be growing more obvious with each passing day? That maybe, just maybe, the Tigers aren't as good as we all thought they would be.

Is it pride that is keeping everybody from writing this team's obituary? I hear that once Curtis Granderson comes off the disabled list, the Tigers are going to start hitting and climb back to the top of the Central division standings. Really? A team that consists of hitters like Magglio Ordonez, Gary Sheffield, Miguel Cabrera, Carlos Guillen, and Ivan Rodriguez is dependent on Curtis Granderson? Are we really supposed to believe that?

I'm not a very superstitious person, I don't believe in curses, and I don't really believe in omens. Though if I'm a member of the Detroit Tigers or a Tigers fan, I might be starting to get a little worried right about now. As if opening the season with three straight losses to the Royals wasn't bad enough, it seems like every few hours the Tigers are losing another player.

They've lost Joel Zumaya and Fernando Rodney from the bullpen, Curtis Granderson has a broken finger and is on the disabled list, and this morning Miguel Cabrera was a late scratch from the lineup . In the post I wrote about Cabrera's injury earlier, I wondered what would happen to Gary Sheffield if Cabrera needed to fill the designated hitter role for a few days. Well, always one looking to help out others, The Sheff has come up with a solution. Unfortunately, it's only going to make things worse.

Sheffield tore a tendon in his ring finger while trying unsuccessfully to stretch a single into a double in the eighth inning.

"He would have not been able to hit if we came around to him in the ninth," Tigers manager Jim Leyland said. "I don't know how serious it was, but he couldn't bend it."

As of now Sheffield's plan is to play through the injury, but whether or not he's going to be able to is another matter. Torn tendons don't heal overnight, and if it's so swollen that he can't even bend it, he's not going to be able to hold a bat, let alone make solid contact using one.

The Tigers have already lost the first two games of their opening series against the Kansas City Royals, and as I write this, they're currently down two runs in the 5th inning trying to avoid a sweep. Things would be a little tougher for the Tigers today, though, as prized acquisition and $153 million man, Miguel Cabrera, was removed from today's lineup before the game thanks to a pulled left quadriceps muscle.

Tigers manager Jim Leyland said that Cabrera could be available as a pinch-hitter, but wasn't sure when he would be able to play the field again.

"He could hit, but he can't run, so I don't want to use him," Leyland said before the game with Kansas City. "He had some trouble with it over the winter and it was sore during the spring, but I don't know if he hurt it during the rundown yesterday or what."

The injury doesn't sound too serious, but still, it's not exactly what the Tigers or Miguel want to be dealing with right now.

If there's any good news for the Tigers, it's that the fact they weren't able to move Brandon Inge in the off-season has been a blessing in disguise this first week. He started the first two games in centerfield for the injured Curtis Granderson, and now today he returns home to third base to fill in for Cabrera.

What I'm wondering is if Cabrera isn't able to play defense for a few days, do the Tigers just rest him until the quad is healthy again, or put him in the DH spot and leave Gary Sheffield on the bench? Though admittedly, that's a problem a lot of teams would love to have.