The question is not whether the Pirates will set a professional sports record with their 17th consecutive losing season in 2009. That's a cinch. The question is whether every other baseball team makes the playoffs during this storied stretch of futility.

With the Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers in the playoffs this week, that leaves the Pirates, Kansas City Royals and Washington Nationals as the only teams not making the postseason at least once since 1993.

It's nearly incomprehensible to do nothing but lose in such an age of conspicuous flag-passing.

The Rays, since their birth in 1998, had seemed the team most doomed to hang with the Pirates in an annual hunt for dead October. The hand that Tampa Bay has been dealt is far worse than Pittsburgh's. The Rays are not just in a bad ballpark with chronically poor attendance, but in the American League East with those twin towers of conspicuous consumption, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Tampa Bay never won even 70 games before this season, but it won the AL East despite injuries to key players.

The Brewers have the franchise most like the Pirates. They're in a similar market with a ballpark of the same 2001 vintage. Milwaukee hadn't made the postseason since its World Series appearance in 1982. It moved from the American to the National League in 1998, and after several years of pulling up the rear of the NL Central with the Pirates, it used smart drafting, a willingness to spend money to make money and a key trade to win. It snatched the wild card Sunday on the strength of its ace, CC Sabathia, for whom it traded prospects in July.

The Pirates went the other way at the trade deadline and broke up what was, ever so briefly, the most productive outfield in baseball. Left fielder Jason Bay went to the Red Sox and right fielder Xavier Nady and reliever Damaso Marte to the Yankees in exchange for eight prospects who may help someday, though early returns have been awful.

The Pirates organization long ago ran out of excuses for chronic failure. All four teams that have joined the majors since the Pirates last had a winning season in 1992 now have made the playoffs, with the Arizona Diamondbacks (born in 1998) winning the 2001 World Series, the Florida Marlins (born in 1993) winning the 1997 and 2003 World Series, the Colorado Rockies (also born in 1993) in the World Series last season, and now the Rays.

Seventeen franchises have played in the 14 Series since 1993. (There was no Series in the strike year of 1994.) Ten are in the NL and seven in AL, and that total has a good chance to grow. Five of the nine teams still alive as I write -- the Brewers, Cubs, Dodgers, Rays and Twins -- would represent new blood in the Series since 1993.

Mostly gone now are local fans and commentators who blamed Major League Baseball or the Yankees for the Pirates' woes. Too many small-market teams have won now, and too many fans have noticed the Pirates don't need to beat the Yankees to win.

It's true that the rich have a decided advantage in baseball, but they always have.

In that way, the national pastime still reflects America itself. It's easier to succeed when you're rich.

But when a ballclub is given 15 consecutive years of high draft choices, a new ballpark and two All-Star games to boost attendance, and still can't find a way to win one more game than it loses even one season, it is in a classlessness by itself.

None dare call Pirates owners idiots. The club has been very successful in the first order of any business: making piles of money.

It's nonetheless true that many millions of dollars in salary has been shed, and it's expected that shortstop Jack Wilson and his $7.25 million salary will be traded this winter, too. The team has no good replacement, and the Pirates' soft-tossing pitchers absolutely need a good glove such as Wilson's at short. But as Pirates general manager Neal Huntington put it, "If there's a good baseball trade out there for anybody, hey, we're not good enough to have untouchables."

It could be worse. The Nationals were once the Montreal Expos and, in August 1994 when the strike put baseball in a coma, the Expos were 74-40 and pulling away in the NL East. The Royals were 64-51 and in the hunt for the AL Central title.

Had both teams made the playoffs that year, then it would be the Pirates alone who did not make the playoffs in the past 16 years.

Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.