The boyfriend and I came up to Baltimore to watch the last game of the Yankees-O’s series last night. I’m not sure I saw the Yanks live in 2009, and damn, it’s good to see them playing like champions again. A.J. was hitting the mid-90’s with his fastball 110 pitches in. Robby Cano crushed a couple of serious line drives. We even have infield defense now! It was glorious. I’m used to going to Nats games, and to be honest I’d forgotten what seeing that caliber of play up close looked like.

To their credit, the O’s didn’t embarrass themselves. Their bright young starter Brian Matusz can throw some serious heat, though I couldn’t tell you where he gets it from. (He has a bizarre pitching motion which at one point requires him to cock his hip like a runway model — back in the days when runway models still had hips.) And I almost felt bad for the O’s fans, who were easily outnumbered by the carpetbaggers, New Yorkers in exile and bandwagoneers.

But their organist, oy. (Does it even make sense to call them “organists” anymore, now that they’re essentially DJs?) It takes a special kind of sick talent, or Eeyore-caliber depressive tendencies, to use your musical selections to generate an atmosphere of existential despair around your franchise. But that’s exactly what he did! “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was hurried along at a rushed, practically embarrassed tempo to make time for some song about being a country boy to which no one sang along (admittedly, that might have been a measure of how few O’s fans there were in the crowd). The game opened with Johnny Cash. And there were not one, but two Killers songs: “Mr. Brightside” at the top of the ninth, which is a hell of a way to refer to a 4-0 deficit, and “Smile Like You Mean It” earlier in the game as the Jumbotron became the “Smile Cam” between innings.

That last one was really what got to me. I like the Killers as much as the next person, but Brandon Flowers doing his best Morrissey impression is hardly going to conjure a Jumbotron-worthy smile in anybody. For heavens’ sake, it was as if the O’s were saying “We know no one could possibly genuinely be having fun watching this, but c’mon, just for a few seconds, could you pretend for the cameras?” The song choice went so far beyond dumb literalism that it’s tempting to hypothesize it was some sort of act of subversion.

This cultivated mopiness — is this a Baltimore thing? Has the city had some sort of postmodern attitude adjustment and decided, damn, if we’re going to be The Wire, we might as well own being The Wire? Is there some sort of catharsis in a ballpark full of self-pity when your team is 4-18? Or is it just that the O’s front office needs to loosen the purse strings just a little bit — not to make sure the next Teixeira doesn’t slip through their fingers (yeah, I went there) but just to heed their poor organist’s loudspeakered cry for help and shell out for some therapy?

Personally, I was grinning like a kid in a candy store the whole time. The Rays are going to be a tough team to beat, but I’m looking forward to the drama. It’s going to be a good year.