View 29 photos from Friday night/Saturday afternoon.

Point-by-point, my observations:

The Tickets: Earlier this week, through MLB.com, I ordered two tickets in Section 326, Row A for $15 each face and $40 total once all the B.S. charges were added. Nice upper-deck view, behind the home dugout, for what would eventually be a sold-out game. Picking them up at the Will Call window took all of 30 seconds. As expected, Row A was a good 12 rows from the front. Expected only because I'm used to seating assignments intended to deceive customers into buying tickets that sound better than they actually are.

The Pre-Game Drink-Up: $1 drafts at a few outdoor bars across the street from the stadium. Not just 8-oz. mini piss cups, but legitimate 12-oz. drafts of familiar domestics, with no line and no hassle, allowing us to mingle with other fans in the glorious late-summer weather. By comparison, Yankee Stadium has a disastrous pre-game environment, with customers paying $7 a bottle to drink in packed bars on River Avenue.

Yankees Fans: Singles, couples, men, women, entire families; we were everywhere. Tens of thousands, all sporting navy-blue t-shirts or pinstriped jerseys. People often exaggerate about the ratio of home and road fans in these instances, but I would say the crowd was pretty much split down the middle, with local O's backers populating the better seats in the season-ticket holders' sections and Yankees fans absolutely dominating the upper tiers. People wearing Yankees regalia far outweighed those in orange and black; our section resembled a Yankees Clubhouse store. I saw only a few Cal Ripken shirts, but many more honoring a fellow hero of the same era, The Greatest Living Ball Player, Don Mattingly.

The Game: Counting Saturday's victory, the Yankees are 8-3 since their 22-0 home debacle, getting a solid start in every game but one. Guess which one I happened to be at? Javy Vazquez and a parade of scrubs got pounded, turning a 3-2 lead into a 10-3 deficit in the third inning, the last I would remain in my seat, en route to a 14-8 loss.

Orioles Fans/Yankee-Haters: If only it was easier to tell, from someone's appearance who was:

a) a longtime Orioles fan, a knowledgable baseball lover with an appreciation for the proud history of both teams; or

b) a jaded, whiny, antagonistic, Yankee-hating asswipe whose first words to you are "Yankees suck!"

I ran into plenty of both. You appreciate the first kind, pity the second (always, always males) for allowing alcohol to give them license to accost tourists simply because of their shirt. Happens everywhere. Happened at Wrigley. Happened at the Superdome for Giants fans. Happens, in New York, unfortunately. Happens everywhere the beers flow.

Movin' on Up: When your team's getting hammered, you can either sit in your seat and get heckled (no thanks) or stick and move. A better idea is to hang out with a police sergeant out by the concessions, drilling beers and learning that more than 107 cops, far more than the usual 38, were assigned to work the game. No problems were reported Friday night, and he said no police officer gets the day off during the Preakness. We then made our move to the lower deck, easing into fifth-row seats down the right-field line. A nearby usher was as pleasant as the rest of the local workers, sharing that Yankees fans can be a bit of a pain, especially cops and fireman who come down and drink too much. Didn't surprise me a bit.

The Mystery Yankee: My travel companion and I walked straight from the game to a bar called Pete's in Inner Harbor. Standing among the throng of college-aged partiers was a freshly showered, prominent Yankee, one making more than $10 million a year (don't they all?). He declined her request for a picture, saying that he "wasn't supposed to be here." Polite guy, though. God knows what he was doing standing among college kids by himself. God knows how he even beat us there.

Pete's: A local told us to hit this Inner Harbor joint after the game, as they serve 32-oz. beers for $4 and outdoor casino tables that play for real money, with proceeds going to support a local hospital. The place was way too packed for my tastes, but when a seat opened up at a $5 blackjack table, I was much more comfortable. It was amateur night, for sure. Like the cheesiest Vegas table times ten, a lot of bad plays, a lot of cheap bets, a lot of drunks zoning out instead of playing their hands, nobody cheering each other on. So despite warnings that it wasn't a fair game, I played a bunch of $50 hands (the maximum), losing my last three and contributing $200 to the hospital, double that of my friend. The dealer hit 21 so many times it was ridiculous. You'd think the deck was devoid of face cards, except for the fact the dealer drew them time and again.

Biltmore Suites Hotel: A 25-room Victorian style hotel a dozen blocks from Camden Yards in a not-so-great part of Mount Vernon, it proved to be just fine for $85/night. Why spend double or triple that for a night when cabs are readily available in Inner Harbor? The staff was perfectly pleasant. Just don't expect the Four Seasons.

Inner Harbor: We weren't staying for the 4:30 p.m. Saturday game, but we did grab lunch in Baltimore's South Street Seaport-like setting. The place was crawling with Yankees' fans, a N.Y. shirt or hat was spotted at more than half of every restaurant's table. Only this time nobody was being harassed for quietly displaying support for his team. Funny how that happens when people aren't drunk.

Overall: Awesome, awesome scene. Camden Yards and Inner Harbor is a great party, but it's not gimmicky. There's still a lot of baseball history there. Yanks-Orioles may be just another game in the Bronx, but not so in Baltimore. Definitely much more of an event, and definitely worth the trip for any Yanks fan. Next year I'll be down for an entire weekend or two, for sure.