BALTIMORE — Brett Gardner and CC Sabathia re-signed with the Yankees within a week of each other last November, one-year deals and pay cuts for both, and the dual transactions carried the feel of the movie “Last Vegas,” a couple of baseball geezers embarking upon a final joy ride together.

One problem existed with that narrative, however: While Sabathia immediately declared this season to be his swan song, Gardner never signed off on the script. And with the way he has played for the Yankees in 2019, exactly why shouldn’t they bring him back for 2020?

“At this point in the season, I expect to be playing next year. Hopefully it’s here,” Gardner told The Post on Wednesday, before the Yankees recorded their eighth straight victory, a 14-2 drubbing of the lowly Orioles. “… I feel like I’m definitely still capable.”

He has seemed particularly capable as of late. After contributing two doubles and an RBI to Wednesday’s effort, exciting the the many Oriole Park at Camden Yards attendants supporting the visitors, the 35-year-old Gardner boasted of a .255/.334/.484 slash line. His 17 homers put him on a pace to top his personal best of 21, which he established in 2017.

Those numbers, plus his typically stellar defense and base running made Gardner the Yankees’ most valuable outfielder this season at the start of Wednesday’s play, as per Baseball-Reference.com’s WAR calculation. He sported a 3.2 WAR to Aaron Judge’s 3.0. That resulted in large part from Gardner’s good health relative to the rest of his injury-riddled club, as his 99 games, including Wednesday, put him third on the team behind Gleyber Torres (105), who has been battling a mystery ailment this week,, and DJ LeMahieu (102).

I asked Aaron Boone if it were fair to say that Gardner has played more and better than the Yankees expected.

“Maybe slightly more, just obviously with all of the injuries, so he has played so much,” the Yankees’ manager said. “But I envisioned him as a regular playing a lot. Better? I don’t know. I have a pretty high expectation of what Gardy is still capable of doing. Obviously the amount of power he has hit for this year, he’s still a really good player. But I think we all saw him that way.”

The decrease in salary from $11.5 million to $7.5 million reflected Gardner’s diminished production — he slashed .236/.322/.368 last year — as well as the plan for him to play less.

“I think that’s something that we kind of communicated through [the front office] and obviously, with the guys that we already had on hand, me re-signing back here, a little like DJ in the infield, right?” Gardner said. “Not really sure how you fit in at the time.

“I just knew that it was going to be a special group of guys and I wanted to be back here. I knew that things would, I don’t want to say work out for the best because I don’t want somebody else to obviously get injured, but yeah, I probably wasn’t expecting to play as often or as frequently as I have.”

While Gardner historically hits far better in the first half (.273/.353/.421) than the second half (.244/.329/.361), he has flipped that script, going .246/.328/.470 before the All-Star break and .308/.368/.558 since.

“As you get older, you learn to do different things and make different adjustments,” said Gardner, who explained that he has worked recently with the Yankees’ coaches on hitting to the opposite field more. His double went to left-center field, just as his two homers did here this week.

Older, wiser and still durable? Sounds like a good fit for a 2020 Yankees outfield that should feature Judge, Aaron Hicks, Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Tauchman and perhaps Clint Frazier (and Jacoby Ellsbury. LOL).

Looks like Gardner, who described this season as “the most exciting, fun year of my career” because of the myriad surprise performances around the Yankees, has at least one more joy ride in him.