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“What went wrong?” seems like a natural question given the fact that the Yankees’ 13-year streak of playoff appearances came to an end this season, but before we begin to sus out the answer to that inquiry, it’s worth asking, “How wrong did things go?” The answer might surprise those Yankee fans who had become spoiled by a playoff streak that was nearly as old as this fall’s high school freshmen.

To begin with, the Yankees had the fourth best record in the American League this year. Their 89-73 mark was a half-game better than that of the AL Central champion White Sox, who needed a tie-breaking 163rd game to pick up their 89th win. Over in the NL, just three teams won more than the Yankees’ 89 games. Joe Torre’s Dodgers, who took their skipper past the first round of the playoffs for the first time since 2004, won just 84 games while playing in a division in which the other four teams had a combined .449 winning percentage. By comparison, the four non-Yankee teams in the AL East had a combined .535 winning percentage. Here are the aggregate winning percentages of each of baseball’s six divisions:

.535 AL East*
.515 NL Central
.501 AL Central
.490 NL East
.487 AL West
.463 NL West

*not including the Yankees’ .549

Playing in a division in which just one team had a winning percentage below .531, the Yankees had the toughest row to hoe in all of baseball in 2008. Even so, they performed at a 90-win pace against their own division—40-32 (.555)—splitting their season series against the Red Sox and Blue Jays and going 11-7 against both the Orioles and the pennant-winning Tampa Bay Rays. The Yanks were even better in interleague play (.556), and against the AL West (.563) despite once again struggling against the Angels, and stayed above .500 against the AL Central (.525). They had just two losing months all year, combining to be just three games below .500 in April and August, and played .582 ball after the All-Star break (a 94-win pace over a full season).

In fact, for all of the injuries and disappointing performances from young players that they endured this year, the Yankees won just five fewer games than in 2007 and actually won two more games than the 2000 Yankees, the last Bomber squad to win the World Series. Then again, that 2000 team was the only Torre-era Yankee team to win fewer than 92 games, and with the Rays having finally arrived atop the AL East, even 92 wins is unlikely to return the Yankees to the playoffs any time soon. Still, when asking what went wrong, it’s worth noting that, while the 2008 Yankees failed to live up to the standards of the franchise’s 13-year playoff streak, they didn’t miss by that much.

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If you want to ruin a party, just bring up religion or politics. This isn’t a political blog, but I had to at least acknowledge the day.

My World Series coverage comes to an end today with one final piece for SI.com, in which I list five things I took away from the 2008 fall classic.

Philadelphia fans had to figure something would go wrong Monday night, though I doubt even they could have anticipated the first suspended postseason game in major league history. The Phillies got within ten outs of their second world championship in Game 5, only to have the Rays tie the game with two outs in the top of the sixth and the umpires call for the tarp after the third out of that frame, after which it rained for 36 hours.

Prior to the 2007 season, Baseball adopted a rule stating that any tie game that is called after becoming official (five innings) would simply be suspended and resumed from the stopping point at a later date just as if it had experience any other extended rain delay. That is what the Rays and Phillies will do tonight, resuming Game 5 in the bottom of the sixth inning at 8:37pm. My preview of what I’m calling Game 5 1/2 is up on SI.com.

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Mike Mussina hasn’t told the Yankees yet if he wants to play next year. At least, no one’s telling if he has. Baseball puts a moratorium on such announcements during the World Series (even if Scott Boras doesn’t comply), but rumor has it he’s leaning toward retirement. I, for one, would love to have Mussina come back for a variety of reasons stretching from his actual performance, to his influence on the Yankees’ young starters, to the likely brevity of his contract, to my own selfish need to hear some legitimately introspective and wickedly sarcastic postgame comments every five days.

Unfortunately, rumor has Mussina leaning in the other direction. Indeed, at the conclusion of Living on the Black, John Feinstein’s plodding account of Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine’s 2007 seasons, Mussina, speaking at the conclusion of his rough 2007 season, sounds convinced that 2008 would be his last year:

“I’m not going to be one of these players who announces his retirement five different times. But right now, I don’t see myself pitching after this year. I’m not going to be close enough to three hundred [wins], even if I have a good year, that I’m going to want to come back for at least two more years and, realistically, three more years.

“In 2006, I pitched about as well as I could have hoped to pitch, and I won fifteen games. If I win fifteen games a year–stay healthy, pitch well, all of that–for the next three years, I would still be five wins short of three hundred, and I’d be forty-two years old. What’s more, my older son will be a teenager by then, and my younger one is only a few years behind. I don’t want to come home just when they’re saying, ‘See ya, Dad.’

“I’ve had a good career. I’m lucky to be in a position that whenever I retire, I don’t have to do anything. I can pick and choose what I want to do or what I don’t want to do. If I have a great year, that might make it harder to walk away. But my plan right now is to walk away, and when the calls come the next spring from teams desperate for pitching, my answer–even if I’m tempted–will be no.”

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The below is an “Outside the Lines” report explaining the emerging scandal over the new Yankee Stadium tax swindle, with a cameo from Friend of the Banter Neil deMause. It may seem petty for the federal government to be concerned with this given the state of our economy, but the Yankees are trying to swindle the government, and thus the tax payers, out of hundreds of millions of dollars. If any other corporation tried a stunt like that, I’d want the feds to investigate, so I’m glad they’re doing so here.

Man, Randy Levine is the ultimate sleaze, ain’t he?

The Tampa Bay Rays have been the story of the 2008 baseball season, but they’re about to get pushed off the front (and back) page. The Rays’ worst-to-first journey has been exciting, but the team has only been around since 1998, and Tampa Bay has already won a Super Bowl and a Stanley Cup this decade. Philadelphia, on the other hand, hasn’t won a professional team sports championship since the USFL’s Philadelphia Stars won that league’s title in 1984, and hasn’t won in one of the four major leagues (the NLF, NHL, NBA, or MLB) since the 76ers’ 1983 NBA championship. The Phillies themselves have won just once in their 125-year history, that coming more than a quarter century ago when Tug McGraw (pictured above), Mike Schmidt, and Steve Carlton led the Phils to their first-ever title in 1980. With Cole Hamels on the mound tonight, all of that is about to change. My Game 5 preview is up on SI.com.

With the help of the various scorecards and ticket stubs I’ve saved over the years, I’ve been able to list roughly 127 games that I’ve attended at Yankee Stadium over the last 20 years. From among all those games, no single memory stands out any more than any single memory stands out from the house I grew up in, or the schools I’ve attended. Yankee Stadium was not so much a landmark that I visited, but a setting for a part of my life. It’s where I grew up as a baseball fan. It’s where I learned to keep score. Where my fandom was forged, challenged, and rewarded. My memory of the Stadium is thus assembled from a large collection of moments. Moments which made up my life as a baseball fan over the last 20 years. What follows is an associative trip through those moments.

The first baseball game I ever went to wasn’t at Yankee Stadium, but at Philadelphia’s old multi-purpose concrete donut, Veteran’s Stadium. Though I knew the Yankees were my team, one I inherited from my grandfathers on both sides of my family, men who remembered Babe Ruth and everything since, I was only getting my feet wet as a baseball fan in the summer of 1986 in the wake of my parents’ separation. Prior to that, my fandom was devoted primarily to music and countless hours of MTV. The Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” became something of a gateway drug to professional sports for me in late 1985, and Super Bowl XX was the first sporting event I watched from start to finish. That summer, the Mets were the hip young team that captured the attention of the tri-state area, and my dad took me on a bus trip organized by his office to see the Mets play the Phillies at the Vet. Despite the artificial turf and the fact that the Mets, who could have clinched the NL East that night, lost, I was hooked. Dad took me on another work trip to see the Mets at the Vet the following summer. By then I had sunk my teeth into the sport, collecting baseball cards, pouring over the statistics, and redirecting my attention to the team I had rightly inherited, the Yankees.

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After three games, the aggregate score of the World Series is dead even at 10-10, but if the Rays don’t win tonight, this thing could be over, as Cole Hamels would pitch for the title tomorrow. Given that this has the potential to be the most exciting World Series since 2001, it would be a shame for it not to go at least six, and preferably seven games, but the last World Series to start off like this also ended in five games as the Yankees beat the Mets in the 2000 fall classic. I explain in my preview of Game 4, which is up over at SI.com.

All of the baseball cards that I use to illustrate my posts are from my personal collection, which includes every regular-issue Topps set dating back to 1979. The first complete set I ever owned was the 1987 set. It remains one of may favorites both because of its nostalgic significance to me, and because of its appealing design and fine photography. With the recent quasi-retirements of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds (the latter of whom was pictured on the first card in the first pack of 1987 Topps cards I ever bought, his .223 average prompting me to think he was some skinny slap-hitting nothing), the last remaining active player who had a card in the 1987 set is Jamie Moyer (Moyer’s then-teammate Greg Maddux is the only other active player from the 1986 season, but his first Topps card was a 1987 traded card). I had written Moyer off as a scrub in the early ’90s. He was released by the Rangers after the 1990 season and spent most of the 1991 and all of the ’92 seasons in the minors, and I figured he was just another anonymous face on a baseball card that I’d never see again.

Instead, Moyer quickly resurrected his career with the Orioles and, after a quick layover in Boston, emerged as an unconventional star with the Mariners just before the turn of the century. Last October, I found myself at his locker in Citizens Bank Park, interviewing him about Coors Field in anticipation of his Game 3 NLDS start, and now, 21 years after I pulled his rookie card out of a pack I bought on a trip to the mall with my mom, he’s starting his first World Series game at the age of 45, and I’m writing about how he could cost the team he grew up rooting for a chance at its second championship, for SI.com. I guess we’ve both come a long way.

Incidentally, the sight of Moyer in a Cubs cap on this card reminds me of the ex-Cub factor, a theory which was popularized in the 1980s stating that the winner of a playoff series could be determined by finding out which team had fewer former Cubs on its roster. The 2001 Diamondbacks (and the 2003 Cubs, who actually won a playoff series themselves) blew a hole in the theory, but for yucks, Phillies Moyer, Matt Stairs, and Scott Eyre outnumber the Rays’ lone ex-Cub, Cliff Floyd, three to one.

Finally, here’s the factoid from the back of the pictured card: “Jamie pitched 3 consecutive No-Hitters at Souderton Area High Scool, Souderton, Pa. in 1980.” Yes, 1980.

The Phillies were supposed to win Game 1 last night behind Cole Hamels, and they did. The Rays are supposed to win Game 2 tonight behind James Shields to salvage a split at home. Result pending. My preview is up on SI.com.

It’s strangely fitting that the Phillies and Rays are meeting in the latter’s first World Series. When then-Devil Rays general manager Chuck LaMar was assembling what would be the inaugural Rays roster in late 1997, he decided to build his team around pitching and defense. Any good defensive team needs a strong defensive shortstop, so LaMar worked out a deal with the Phillies to draft a young outfielder out of the Astros’ system in that November’s expansion draft and flip him to Philadelphia for the Phillies good-field/no-hit shortstop Kevin Stocker.

Stocker had taken over the Phillies shortstop job as a rookie in July of their pennant-winning season of 1993 and had since established himself as one of the game’s best defenders at the position. A 27-year-old switch-hitter who wouldn’t price himself off the team, Stocker was exactly what LaMar was looking for to anchor his new team’s infield. The problem was that LaMar had failed to notice the steep drop off in Stocker’s defense during the 1997 season. Stocker’s glove recovered in 1998, but he had his worst season at the plate, hitting just .208/.282/.313, and his season was mercifully ended a month early when his hand was broken by a pitch. The next year his bat picked up, but his glove work declined again, and knee tendonitis ended his season soon after the All-Star break.

That winter, LaMar scrapped his defense-first concept, signing aging sluggers Greg Vaughn and Vinnie Castilla to join Jose Canseco and original Ray Fred McGriff in the Tampa lineup. Stocker, the symbol of the Rays’ abandoned approach of just two years earlier, was released in May. Despite LaMar’s shift in focus, the Devil Rays of 2000 once again finished a distant last in the American League in runs scored. Making things worse, the young outfielder Lamar had used as currency to acquire stocker was a 23-year-old Bobby Abreu, who hit .312/.409/.497 as the Phillies’ right fielder in the Rays’ inaugural season of 1998 and proceeded to perform at a Hall of Fame level over his eight and a half seasons in Philadelphia.

Now, a decade later, LaMar is the Phillies’ scouting director, and his team is in the World Series against a Rays’ team that produced its first winning season, first playoff berth, first division title, and first pennant in part due to a renewed focus on pitching and defense. The signature player in that renewed focus is Jason Bartlett, a good-field/no-hit shortstop who was acquired for a talented young outfielder. The trick being that Bartlett wasn’t the key player in the deal that brought him to Tampa Bay from the Twins, righty starter Matt Garza was, and the outfielder he was traded for, Delmon Young, is no Bobby Abreu, which just goes to prove that intention is only as good as its execution.

To be fair, LaMar deserves to have a better legacy in Tampa Bay. It was under Lamar that the Rays drafted Aubrey Huff, Carl Crawford, Rocco Baldelli, James Shields, B.J. Upton, Andy Sonnanstine, and Young, and it was Lamar who fleeced the Mets in the Scott Kazmir deal. Still, it took a change in ownership and an overhaul of the front office for the Rays to figure out how to make proper use of that bounty.

My point in all of this is that, even in a World Series in which the two combatants have just one prior championship between them (the lowest combined total since 1980 when the Phillies and Royals met, both looking for their first), there is still some history here.

For more from me on this match-up, check out my position-by-position breakdown and preview of Game 1, both up on SI.com.

The Tampa Bay Rays are a good baseball team. In fact, they’re the best team in baseball. I give four reasons why over at SI.com.

They’ve been doing this for years . . . friggin’ Red Sox. If the Rays stagger like zombies through tonight’s game, which they likely will, it’ll be like 2004 all over again, except in a dome and on artificial turf. Awful. My preview of Game 7 is up on SI.com.

Some teams would have been knocked out by the Red Sox’s Game 5 comeback, the 2004 Yankees among them. I don’t think the Rays are one of those teams and expect them to wrap up the pennant tonight. My prediction for this series was Sox in seven, but only if the Rays fail to win it in six. Never mind that I got most of the others wrong (Dodgers in six? Not so much). My preview of tonight’s Game 6 is up on SI.com.

Congress is taking Assemblyman Richard Brodsky’s report about the new Yankee Stadium’s cooked books seriously. The charge is being led by Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who is chairman of the House’s Domestic Policy subcommittee:

In an e-mail interview on Thursday, Kucinich said that “our factual findings could be the basis for a later agency or court finding of legal liability.”

In the letter and interview, he cautioned that the I.R.S. could roll back the tax-exempt status of some or all of the stadium bonds. He also suggested that the I.R.S. could reject the Yankees’ pending request for tax-free status on an additional $366 million in bonds to complete the financing of the stadium.

One wonders if such action by the I.R.S. could have a direct effect on team payroll in the coming years, thereby making the Yankees’ proposed spending spree this winter one that severely handicaps their flexibility in subsequent offseasons. It seems a long shot, and I certainly wouldn’t expect the Yankees to alter their behavior in the near term, but this bears watching.

So the Yankees wrapped up their organizational meetings yesterday and they have their offseason plan in place. According to SI.com’s Jon Heyman, the plan appears to be get everyone:

The Yankees’ top executives have decided to pursue many of the game’s premier free agents, chief among them starting pitchers CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Derek Lowe, and first baseman Mark Teixeira, among others, this winter. They will also will pursue Jake Peavy, the Padres’ Cy Young-winning starting pitcher who may be available via trade, and may take a look at top free-agent outfielder Manny Ramirez . . . The Yankees will also consider bringing back starting pitcher Andy Pettitte, who has told them he’d like to return. . . . The Yankees may also consider Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets as yet another free-agent alternative, but there are some concerns about his injury history. If Mike Mussina decides he want to keep pitching, the Yankees would be interested in him, as well.

All this really tells us is that they Yankees aren’t ruling anyone out and do plan to be big spenders this winter. So that’s good, but before you get yourselves in a tizzy trying to figure out who the Yankees can trade for 2007 NL Cy Young award winner Peavy, bear this in mind from Pete Abe:

Barry Axelrod, Peavy’s agent, made it clear this afternoon that his client wants to stay in the National League. “It’s where he’s comfortable,” Axelrod said. “He knows the hitters and he enjoys that aspect of the game himself.”

In other news, Chien-Ming Wang is throwing off a mound, the Yankees have stated their intent to return Joba Chamberlain to the rotation for 2009, and Phil Hughes is tearing up the hitters’ paradise that is the Arizona Fall League with the new cutter he showed in his late-season return. That’s all very encouraging and means the Yankees are really only likely to sign two, three tops of the six non-Peavy pitchers listed above, which includes Pettitte and Mussina.

If it were up to me, I’d stay away from Burnett and Sheets due to their Pavano-esque injury histories. Sheets averaged 134 2/3 innings from 2005 to 2007 and was unable to help the Brewers in the playoffs due to reoccurring elbow pain. Burnett had made 30 starts just once his his nine major league seasons prior to his walk year this year. Instead, I’d go after Sabathia (of course), Lowe, and Moose, with Pettitte as a backup option.

Lowe will be 36 in June, so he shouldn’t be offered much more than a two-year deal. If he wants more, the Yanks can let him go and sign Pettitte, who has said he won’t sign elsewhere and should take another one-year deal. Pettitte was awful down the stretch, but blamed his poor performance on a loss of stamina due to his failure to stick to his usual winter workout regimen as he wanted to stay out of sight during the fallout from the Mitchell Report. Mussina might want another two-year deal if he decides to return, as a return may mean a commitment to go for 300 wins (he’s at 270), but he earned it by reestablishing himself as the staff ace this season. Given the fact that Wang, Chamberlain, and Hughes are in their team-control years, as is everyone in the bullpen except for Mariano Rivera and Damaso Marte (if the Yankees decide to pick up his $6 million option), a pair of two-year deals for Moose and Lowe would be extremely affordable and leave plenty of payroll room for the Yankees to throw Johan Santana money at Sabathia. Of course, CC, a career .261 hitter who connected for two home runs this year, may also prefer to stay in the NL where he can hit, but if that’s the case, the Yanks can up their offers to Lowe and especially Mark Teixeira, the latter of whom is the free agent I most hope the Yankees will sign this winter.

Joe Maddon has taken a team that was the worst in the majors a year ago and brought them to within one game of the World Series, but with a chance to win that one game tonight, he’s swapped out his best starter in favor of the one who gave up five runs in 4 1/3 innings in Game 2 . . . and it’s the right move. Now that’s mavericky! Of course the Rays may lose tonight, but they might have lost anyway like they did the last time they faced Daisuke Matsuzaka, and now they’re more likely to win Game 6. My preview’s up on SI.com.

And since I’ve got SNL in my LCS, here’s a little something for NL fans.

Something tells me Matt Stairs’ home run in Game 4 was the unofficial end of the Dodgers’ season. We’ll find out tonight. The Dodgers’ last hope is that their 24-year-old ace, Chad Billingsley, can beat the Phillies’ 24-year-old ace, Cole Hamels. I don’t see it happening. My preview is up on Si.com.

Random Thought: how often did the Dodgers’ 68-year-old manager accidentally call Billingsley “Clay Bellinger” this year?