If that is the case, then what does it take to build a streak of 17 consecutive losing seasons?

I’d say a small army of incompetent executives.

The Pirates set a record for the ages Monday with a 4-2 loss to the Chicago Cubs at PNC Park. Their 17th consecutive sub.-500 season is the most in North American major professional sports history.

However, the people most responsible for this once-proud franchise _ those under 25 please take my word, this franchise was once proud _ were nowhere to be found. Instead, it was people like club president Frank Coonelly and general manager Neal Huntington who had to watch loss No. 82 of this season and defeat No. 1,501 since 1993.

Coonelly and Huntington have played a small part in the 17 straight losing seasons with a few missteps, notably botching the Jason Bay trade and getting next to nothing back for a premier slugger. However, they can only be assigned a tiny fraction of blame.

Coonelly and Huntington inherited the baseball equivalent of a condemned house when they joined the Pirates late in the 2007 season. They had no choice but to demolish the structure and start over.

Instead, there are other people who should be blamed for the Pirates reaching an uncharted level of futility.

--Mark Sauer, who was hired as club president in 1992 after Carl Barger left to head up the expansion Florida Marlins. Sauer was personable and bright but bottom line-oriented. His only goal from the day he took the job was to cut costs and put the Pirates in the black. Unlike Barger, he didn’t care if the Pirates ever won.

The Pirates did win the last of three National League East titles in 1992 but that was through the sheer brilliancy of manager Jim Leyland and left fielder Barry Bonds as the roster already had started to be dismantled in spring training with the trade of 20-game winner John Smiley.

Sauer started all this losing and nobody has been able to stop it.

--Cam Bonifay was promoted from assistant general manager to GM by Sauer midway through the 1993 season, replacing Ted Simmons. Simmons was relieved of his duties while in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, a pretty strong indication the Pirates had a new _ and unseemly _ way of doing business.

Bonifay was a good man and talent evaluator but a bad GM. He put too much trust in his scouts and did not believe in statistical analysis. Thus, Bonifay made a series of poor personnel moves based on his scouts’ misevaluations of players, even when the objective data screamed otherwise.

Bonifay, amazingly, kept his job for seven years before finally being fired midway through the 2001 season. His farewell press conference was painful to attend as he looked like a man on the verge of a breakdown as his mood kept changing from defiant to melancholy throughout his goodbye.

--Dave Littlefield was the man who replaced Bonifay. The former Florida assistant GM certainly looked the part with his stylish clothes and athletic build. He also had a gift for making people believe what he was saying, even if it made no sense.

While it is impossible to quantify the performance of a GM, there is little in doubt that he has to rank among the worst in baseball annals. His litany of blunders is amazing, from trading Aramis Ramirez to the Chicago Cubs for nothing to thinking such broken-down veterans as Matt Morris, Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa and Sean Casey could still play to passing on the chance to trade Kip Wells for Ryan Howard to believing Daniel Moskos was a better player than Matt Wieters in the 2007 draft.

The only thing dumber than those decisions was ownership actually giving Littlefield six years to completely destroy the franchise before finally firing him late in the 2007 season.

--Roy Smith usually skates by without taking any blame for the Pirates’ losing but he served as assistant GM under both Bonifay and Littlefield and was the brains behind so many boneheaded decisions.

Smith thought Brant Brown could play center fielder and advocated trading an above-average major-league pitcher, Jon Lieber, to the Cubs for him after the 1997 season. Smith thought it was wise to sign Derek Bell between the 2000 and 2001 seasons as a free agent and the veteran outfield became the ultimate Pirate as he lived on a boat and stole money. And it was Smith who believed Morris could still pitch in the major leagues, leading to a trade in which the Pirates got exactly five wins from the right-hander for $13 million.

One other thing that stood out about Smith was his smugness. Of course, being smug was apparently part of the job description of being an assistant GM under Bonifay because John Sirignano was just as smug as Smith. In fact, I spent way too much time in the late 1990s trying to figure who was more smug, Smith or Sirignano.

--Kevin McClatchy fits right into the smug category as we’ve saved the best for last.

Yes, we all know how the former Pirates’ chief executive officer put together a group that kept the Pirates from possibly being sold to out-of-town interest and it was McClatchy who got the funding for PNC Park to get built. However, that is partially revisionist history. National League president Leonard Coleman was never going to let Pittsburgh lose the Pirates and mayor Tom Murphy was the man who ultimately secured the money to build the park.

It was McClatchy who kept extending the contracts of Bonifay and Littlefield when it was clear to everyone in baseball that neither was an effective GM. More than once, I had GMs from other teams ask me in private how Bonifay and Littlefield kept their jobs.

It was also McClatchy who couldn’t capitalize and mak,e a profit despite having a quarter-billion dollar stadium built for him primarily with tax money and also being thrown the life preserver of a revenue-sharing All-Star Game by Major League Baseball.

The organization has certainly gotten better since Bob Nutting took over for McClatchy as the Pirates’ control person prior to the 2007 season. Nutting has brought in two bright executives in Coonelly and Huntington, and they have put together a cohesive plan to attempt to right the perpetually listing franchise.

However, even Nutting has to take some of the blame in this. McClatchy enlisted him, his father G. Ogden and brother Bill as investors while putting together the group that purchased the Pirates in 1996. The Nutting family held seats on the Pirates’ board of directors and a sizeable financial investment while McClatchy ran the Pirates but were so slow to stop him from running the franchise into the ground that they are now just digging out from the mess.

The Pirates at least can look forward with some hope. They have a potential superstar in their major-league lineup in rookie center fielder Andrew McCutchen and another one in the farm system in Class AA Altoona third baseman Pedro Alvarez. They have spent significant money to upgrade their scouting and player development departments.

So, the future certainly looks better. Of course, it would almost be impossible to be worse than these past 17 seasons.