Baseball’s regular season is 10 days from its conclusion and the Boston Red Sox aren’t limping to the finish, they’re lying in a gurney with a bad wheel outside the emergency O.R. and the nurse is stepping on the oxygen cord.

Up nine games on the Tampa Bay Rays on Sept. 1, the Red Sox may yet pull off the gag of all regular season baseball gags.

Forget about 1948, 1949, 1972, 1978 or any of the franchise’s most epic  late-season collapses. Those are ancient history.

The disintegration of the 2011 Red Sox will long be remembered for its thoroughness, for the roles that every part of the big league outfit played in it.

Might as well start at the top. Ownership’s little Keeping Up with the Steinbrenners obsession places more emphasis on winning the offseason than using the offseason to fill holes and find parts to complement the ball club.

Winning the offseason is why Carl Crawford is in a Boston Red Sox uniform.

I subscribe to the theory that ownership ordered general manager Theo Epstein to sign Crawford to sell tickets. Remember that the Red Sox were virtually irrelevant in the final weeks of last season. NESN’s ratings dipped significantly.

Crawford’s signing, and it was a bit stunning at the time coming right on the heels of the trade for Adrian Gonzalez, delivered that jolt. That they had no logical place to fit him in the lineup and that his defensive skills are wasted and diminished by playing left field at Fenway didn’t matter. It tweaked the Yankees and it got them some free pub right before Christmas.

That is Epstein’s only mulligan. The future GM of the Chicago Cubs has been personally responsible for a lot more bad decisions: John Lackey, Bobby Jenks, Mike Cameron, to name a few. Aside from Adrian Gonzalez, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Alfredo Aceves and Mike Aviles (seriously, he’s Theo’s fourth-best acquisition since the 2010 trading deadline), there is nothing nice to say about any of them except that Lackey can walk to the mound under his own power. Which is, unfortunately, a lot to be said in the rotation’s current state.

Terry Francona said in a recent interview that the most important thing to do as a manager is to remain consistent. Unfortunately, the interviewers didn’t follow up and ask:

Consistent with what, Terry? With your approach to every game? With your demeanor? With your message to the team? With the way you handle your pitching? With your expectations for your players playing through pain?

Francona’s answer would probably be “Everything,” and it works a lot more than some of his critics like to admit. It drives us critics crazy when the ship looks like its sinking and and the captain is preoccupied with keeping an even keel.

The players aren’t making the manager’s job a lot easier. Hitting with runners in scoring position has been a problem almost the entire second half of the season. The runs have come in bunches, and rarely against good pitching.

Jacoby Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia and Gonzalez have been the center of MVP discussions earlier in the season. Only Ellsbury has kept that pace. Pedroia has been woefully inconsistent. Gonzalez now gets on base a lot and … that’s about it.

The creaky middle of the order also includes Kevin Youkilis, the Greek God of Cortisone, and David Ortiz, who has been terrific but has a bad back.

Nothing is more creaky than the starting rotation. Half my brain is trying to figure out how many times Josh Beckett can pitch in the next 10 days. Half my brain wonders if Beckett’s can physically make it to next Tuesday.

All of my brain wants to know if I should panic over Jon Lester’s last two starts or declare that the Rays are his daddy. I wouldn’t worry about Lester so much if the Lackey-Wakefield-Weiland troika didn’t already scream “THREE GAME LOSING STREAK!” Save for Jonathan Papelbon, the bullpen, another of Epstein’s weaknesses, has been getting worse as the season goes on.

There is a sense that the entire organization stepped off the accelerator when the media proclaimed the wild card race over no more than two weeks ago. Whether it was arrogance or complacency, a lot of people have had to under-perform in Boston to make this the most tense final week of the season in years.

Please spread the blame around liberally when this season ends before it should have.