With just more than a month in baseball’s record books, the Pittsburgh Pirates already appear well on their way to a 16th-straight losing season.

Despite the struggles, a Hermitage man isn’t willing to write the team off just yet. Instead, he writes them up.

Patrick Lackey, 23, uses his Internet blog to chronicle the franchise that has had far more downs than ups the past decade.

“It’s really taken off beyond anything I ever expected,” he said.

Lackey started the blog in 2005 as a way to share his opinions, musings and ideas to improve the team with his friends and family.

The blog — “Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?” — attracts more than 900 visits each day from Pirate fans from around the region, nation and globe, he said.

A blog, short for “Web log,” is a regularly updated Web site usually devoted to news or commentary on a particular subject.

More than 112 million blogs worldwide on just about every topic you can think of were tracked in a 2007 census by Technorati, a blog search engine.

Sports blogs, especially those like Lackey’s journaling the seasons and day-to-day operations of teams across North America, have grown in popularity in recent years.

WHYGAVS, as Lackey’s faithful have nicknamed the blog, has received more than 500,000 visitors.

“I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started,” Lackey said.

Finishing his first year in a graduate biochemistry program at the University of North Carolina, he began writing the blog three years ago while attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

“The name has gotten a lot of attention,” said Lackey, who penned it after his favorite Pirate, a top player from the team’s early-1990s triumphs.

Lackey grew up playing baseball and attended 20 or 30 Pirate games a year while at Duquesne, he said.

Each day, he sets aside one or two hours in between classes, lab work and studying to update the site and interact with readers.