By GERALD NEILY
The Orioles’ 2009 season marks the unlucky thirteenth anniversary of the curse of the New York Devil Child Jeffrey Maier, who as a twelve-year-old attending the 1996 playoffs, reached over the right field stands to turn a routine Yankee flyout into a Derek Jeter home run, thus condemning the Orioles to an endless epoch of futility.

The curse is already manifesting itself in four ways for the 2009 season.

Jinxing ourselves
The first is the dangerously escalating hype surrounding the imminent arrival of Matt Wieters, easily the most celebrated Oriole rookie since Cal Ripken. Do we really want to tempt the baseball gods this way? Look what happened to Adam Loewen after only a tiny fraction of the hype now being served upon Wieters.

The second is the delivery of Baltimore boy Mark Teixeira to the Yankees for some obscene amount of money. Like you actually expected him to sign with the O’s?

The third is the delivery of perennial Orioles underachiever Daniel Cabrera forty miles down the road to the Washington Nationals, thus spreading our accursedness southward.

When DC finally got a team several years ago, we thought it marked the end of Peter Angelos’ grand experiment of shared pain and suffering between the two cities, cutting the O’s fan base in two and re-branding them as a “small market” team that would no longer attempt to compete with the Yankees and Red Sox on their own ultra-financial terms. Not that it was working anyway.

This had profound geographical significance, because in severing Baltimore’s ties with Washington, the Orioles created a huge vacuum of unsold tickets which have since been filled by Yankees and Red Sox fans looking for a home away from their own overcrowded and overpriced homes to the north.

NY fans detestable, but deep-pocketed
Which brings us to the fourth new development: the brand new Yankee Stadium which opens this year. Will Yankee fans continue to ride Amtrak down to B’more to watch their team when they have a new $1.5 billion dollar palace of their own?

The sad part of this quandary is that Baltimore has really come to rely on all those New York dollars floating down to Charm City. It’s not just Angelos, it’s all of us. We need the money. We need the jobs. We’re now willing to let our smatterings of applause for Nick Markakis be drowned out by the obnoxious thundering Bronx roar for Joba Chamberlain.

The turning point happened last year, which was also marked by the ongoing curse. First, we no longer had the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to kick around. Built around seductive low priced young virginal talent like Evan (not Eva) Longoria, Scott Kazmir and BJ Upton, the Devil Rays exorcised the Devil, became the Rays, and beat the Yankees into the World Series.

Until last year, the O’s could always say that, well… we stink, but not as bad as the Devil Rays. No more.

Ugly hotel, ugly truth
The second development last year was more insidious. It was the opening of that new hotel in left field. Sure, it’s ugly, but why hide the ugly truth behind a beautiful skin? The truth is that Baltimore taxpayer blood money built this hotel to house the Yankee and Red Sox fans who we have lured to Camden Yards. Thus, the selling of our soul is now memorialized in bricks and mortar. We not only need those evil Yankee and Red Sox dollars to fill seats, restaurants and other hotels, we need them to fill our own hotel – the largest in the city.

But at least we’ve done something. Pity poor Tampa Bay. They have a great young team, but they’re a thousand miles from the northeast power corridor, so they’re still not drawing fans except a few old retired transplanted New Yorkers and New Englanders trying to decide which young Rays to covet and shower with riches upon their impending free agency.

So we can only be glad that, unlike Tampa, Baltimore has decent Amtrak service from New York and Boston. And we can only hope that they will continue to come to Baltimore, perhaps to check out Matt Wieters so that when he becomes a free agent in several years, they can decide how much they want to pay him to move to New York.