Who is to blame for the collapse of the Pittsburgh Pirates?

I am.

Yes, me.

I did it. Oops. Sorry.

While I didn’t hit under .200 or have an ERA approaching 6, I was responsible for one of the worse things that could have happened to the Buccos.

I believed in them.

It was easy to, after all. On Aug. 8 the Pirates were 63-47. A winning record seemed inevitable.

All they needed to do was win 19 games over the final two months of the season.

Easy, I thought. That’s a 19-33 record over the final 52 games. It would be their worst stretch of the season by far, but it would still be a winning season, I reasoned.

Little did I know the season was about to swirl down the toilet.

As it turns out, I vastly underestimated the club’s ability to tank.

The pitching tanked. The hitting, which wasn’t very good to begin with, tanked. Clint Hurdle tanked.

The front office tanked. It came to light that general manager Neal Huntington and assistant GM Kyle Stark were running a Navy SEALs-esque Instructional League with players rolling giant tires in the outfield and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

Hoka Hey.

Players hated it. The rest of baseball laughed at it.

Perhaps what has made this 20th installment of the Biggest Baseball Loser even more difficult to stomach is the fact that it didn’t have to happen.

Maybe why fans are so ticked off is because the Pirates were so tantalizingly close to being a winner this season.

It’s often hard to swallow a loss when victory is so close.

Had the Pirates been, well, the Pirates we have been used to for most of the past 20 years and stunk from the start, the losing season would have happened with little grousing.

“Oh, well,” we would have collectively groaned. “It’s the Pirates.”

Instead, the club teased us with what could have been, then snatched it away faster than you can say “Gaby Sanchez.”

Once the sting wears off, I think all of us can look at this with more objective eyes.

While better, the Pirates really weren’t a winning team. At least not yet.

Take a look at the lineup. The starting catcher hit .206. The regular shortstop hit .229 with 16 errors.

And even though Pedro Alvarez hit 30 home runs (seemingly all in about 15 games), he struck out 180 times and committed 27 errors.

This team was flawed. Better, but flawed.

Hurdle can bear some of the blame for Operation: Meltdown. He handled the pitching staff poorly and failed to pull the club out of the tailspin in the final two months.

But the problem is what it has been for 20 years: There’s not enough talent on the field.

There’s always next year.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.