Losing Pirates advised that it’s audition time

Associated Press

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CC'S GEM: Milwaukee Brewers pitcher CC Sabathia delivers a pitch against the Pittsburgh Pirates in the eighth inning of Sunday's game at PNC Park in PIttsburgh. Sabathia threw a one-hitter in the Brewers' 7-0 win.

The last-place Bucs have dropped 10 straight contests.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — General manager Neal Huntington told the talent-stripped Pittsburgh Pirates Sunday that they can’t coast through the rest of the season despite being without their two top offensive players — and “every game” in September is an audition for 2009.

The Pirates’ 7-0 loss Sunday to Milwaukee — in which they were held to one hit — was their 10th in a row, their longest losing streak since they dropped 13 in June 2006. Since dealing left fielder Jason Bay to the Boston Red Sox July 31, a trade that came a few days after they dealt right fielder Xavier Nady to the New York Yankees, the Pirates are 7-21.

That August record was their worst in any month since they went 5-22 in September 1998 and reflects an offense that has gone from being one of the NL’s best to one of the league’s worst since Bay and Nady were traded.

The Pirates are 57-79 and, with three more losses, would tie the 1933-48 Philadelphia Phillies’ major league record of 16 consecutive losing seasons — the longest losing run in any of the four major pro sports leagues.

Huntington’s take: No excuses are allowed.

“We do this to win. We play to win. We don’t accept losing,” Huntington said. “We don’t tolerate losing. It’s not OK. It is frustrating — this has not been a good stretch. We had a remarkably tough schedule in August, but the bottom line is we have not won as much as we have needed to.”

The Pirates are losing at the same rate they did a year ago during a 68-94 season that promoted the departures of former team president Kevin McClatchy, general manager Dave Littlefield and manager Jim Tracy. The new leadership of president Frank Coonelly, Huntington and manager John Russell promised to change the organization’s mind-set and adopt a “culture of winning.”

While the Pirates were not expected to contend this season, those inside the organization did not anticipate that the record could be worse than last season’s.

“You get into a stretch like this and it’s ‘Oh, it’s just like it was in the past,’ ” Huntington said. “Well, in our minds, it isn’t. We’ve got some good young players and we’re going to supplement those young players as we need to going forward. We feel it is different, the culture is changing, we play hard from the first pitch to the last.”

Still, the Pirates have had losses of 11-3, 14-9, 12-3, 10-4, 11-2 and 7-0 during the losing streak, the kind of defeats that can’t be blamed solely on two missing bats in the middle of the lineup.

Huntington said the Pirates will bring up seven to 10 players once rosters can be expanded to 40 today.