Jun 29, 2010 By Herald Standard Staff 3 min read

PITTSBURGH – The Pirates’ management group has been preaching accountability ever since it was put into place late in the 2007 season. Club president Frank Coonelly uses the word incessantly and it is also a large part of general manager Neal Huntington and manager John Russell’s vocabulary.

However, they rarely seem to ever actually be accountable for everything. The losses keep piling up but there is always one excuse or another, whether it’s the previous regime having left a big mess (which it did), the players who have been acquired from other organization having not learned the proper way to play the game (which is lame) or the media misconstruing things and painting a negative but inaccurate picture of the organization (which is really lame).

With that in mind, it was quite heartening to learn that Russell finally stood and did something about his team’s continuing embarrassing play following a 3-2 loss on Sunday to the Athletics in Oakland that included four errors and another woeful offensive performance.

Instead of attributing his team’s poor play to youth and putting on the happy face by saying his players are putting forth a good effort, Russell actually got angry. He closed the clubhouse doors and gave the players a tongue-lashing, and then did not sugarcoat the assessment of his team’s play when he met with the media.

“We stunk,” Russell said. “We’re not a very good team.”

No, the Pirates aren’t very good. They entered Monday night’s game against the Cubs at Chicago with two very ugly round numbers in the win-loss column: 25 and 50.

That’s 25 wins and 50 losses for an abysmal .333 winning percentage that puts them on pace to finish the season at 54-108. No Pirates’ team has lost that many games since the legendary 1952 Rickey Dinks went 42-112 and gave catcher Joe Garagiola two decades’ worth of funny stories to tell the Saturday afternoon audiences on NBC’s Game of the Week.

The Pirates not only have the worst record in the National League, but are close to catching for seemingly uncatchable Baltimore Orioles for the worst mark in the majors. The Orioles are now just two games behind the Pirates at 23-52 after putting together a four-game winning streak.

Russell admitted a couple of weeks ago that he was hesitant to be too tough on a team that plays three rookies regularly and has another first-year player in the starting rotation.

“I know a lot of fans criticize me for not yelling and screaming, but I can’t do that,” Russell said. “We’ve got a lot of young kids who are just getting their feet wet in the major leagues. The last thing they need is me yelling and screaming at them. They’re going to go through tough times and I need to be positive for them to help them and the team get through those tough times.”

However, the problem with Russell being so positive is that it created an atmosphere where there was no accountability because losing had become accepted. When you walked into the clubhouse after a loss, no one seemed upset about absorbing another defeat.

Whether Russell’s show of anger Sunday will make a difference remains to be seen but it has to be viewed as a step in the right direction.

Herald-Standard sports correspondent John Perrotto is editor-in-chief of BaseballProspectus.com.