Intern Bill, who we may soon put on Willie Randolph watch, is mildly interested at the level of suck the Detroit Tigers have achieved this season. Jim Leyland must be on the hot seat! Oh, whoops, he’s not. The toothless Tigers are 11 games under .500, 11 games out of first, and their pitching staff has the fourth worst ERA in baseball (4.78). Bonderman’s hurt, Sheff’s creaky, and Zumaya, we can only assume, is on Death Cab for Cutie’s tour bus.

It was reported over the weekend that Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Jeremy Bonderman has undergone a procedure to remove a blood clot from underneath his shoulder, effectively ending his 2008 campaign. Meanwhile, Dontrelle Willis, he of the funky delivery, DUI, and 1:4 K/BB ratio, was annihilated last night so badly that today he was sent to A-ball (not even AAA or AA – single A!) in Lakeland, and may eventually come out looking like Rick Ankiel.

Jim Leyland was wishing for the day he’ll be able to abandon the sunken ship that is the 2008 Tigres and start accosting nurses again, Eminem style.

Monday’s game was probably a pretty good summary of the season the Tigers are having, surpassing perhaps even the’07-’08 Chicago Bulls for pre-season excitement and eventual disappointment. Baseball Prospectus has their playoff odds at less than four percent, and while those projections aren’t always correct, it certainly doesn’t paint a good portrait of things to come. This club has the kind of problems we might not have known at the beginning of the season, but we’re starting to figure out pretty quickly.

Pitching – People following baseball had a pretty good idea that pitching would be a weakness of the 2008 Tigers, but no one expected it to be this bad, this quickly. Bonderman stopped striking guys out, Rogers has run out of pine tar, Verlander might be paying for the 223 total innings, including playoffs (!) he threw his rookie year, and Willis has been a flat out disaster. Honestly, did anyone think that Dontrelle was going to work out? The guy was overrated in a pitcher’s park in the NL East, and now he moves to the AL Central? The bullpen and “Little Cat” Armando Galarraga (one of the best nicknames in show business!) have been bright spots, but someone needs to soak up innings, and the fact that Leyland actually drove 60 miles to see if Fernando Rodney and Joel Zumaya are progressing in AAA isn’t all that encouraging on this front.

Defense – When you have a DH trying to play right, a 1B trying to play 3rd, a 3B that can barely play 1st, and a cranky C/3B/RF/etc. playing everywhere, we’re not sure this is a properly constructed roster. These guys are put out there like a fantasy team! Just because Troy Glaus was SS eligible in 2007 in Y! leagues doesn’t mean you’d actually play him there. Not if you wanted to win, at least. CF Curtis Granderson, 2B Placido Polanco, and C “Pudge” Rodriguez (he of the .635 OPS!) can still pick it, but there are still way too many holes in a ballpark of that size.

Injuries - Willis, Sheffield, Granderson, Rodney, Zumaya, backup C Vance Wilson have all spent time on the DL. Part of it is because of age, part of it is because of freak accidents, and some of it is the wear and tear that naturally occurs as a part of the professional baseball season. The problem with giving up so much talent for Edgar Renteria and Miguel Cabrera is that when you need Jair Jurrjens, Cameron Maybin, or Andrew Miller to pick up the slack when injuries occur, they’re too busy winning games for better teams.

So can this crew turn it around? Absolutely. If Verlander starts pitching to his projections, Pudge turns into his pre-2000 self, and the other two contenders fall off the map, it’s possible. But very, very unlikely. The worst part about all this is that they have big dollars committed to a lot of these players, so this is the core they’ll have for the foreseeable future.

And to add even more insult to the injuries, the original Tigers Stadium (tied for the oldest ballpark in the majors when it opened in the early 1900’s) is scheduled to be razed so that the city can develop… a Wal-Mart? An office park? Low-income housing? A shooting gallery that’s not the Detroit City Fire Department? No one knows exactly. But instead of letting companies tear the sainted relic down and sell it for scrap, why not just wait for Devil’s night, when the good citizens of Detroit can burn the place for kicks? Imagine the scene: late October, the hometown nine haven’t played in weeks, and the denizens of D-Town are burning last evidence of relevance the city had on the sport of baseball other than that of a punch line.

It would be a fitting end to the 2008 Detroit Tigers.