MLB

ON THE ROPES, INDIANS STILL TAKE THE FIFTH (INNING)

CLEVELAND – The infuriating thing was this: The game plan worked. The blueprint worked. The Yankees had a book on C.C. Sabathia, the man who could well win the Cy Young Award in the American League for 2007. They preached patience. They demanded discipline. It was a simple rule: Take. Take. Take. Take.

“Make sure,” Johnny Damon said, “that when he throws a strike, it’s really a strike.”

This isn’t a new formula for the Yankees, whose games can sometimes last longer than two Ken Burns documentaries played back-to-back because of all the pitches they take that are little more than a cat’s whiskers wide of the plate. They also happened to have an unwitting co-conspirator in home plate umpire Bruce Froemming, whose strike zone can be about the size of a belt buckle.

“It wasn’t Bruce,” Sabathia would say later. “It was command, and the Yankees forcing you to throw balls right in the zone.”

The Indians had run out to a 4-1 lead. The 44,608 people inside Jacobs Field were apoplectic, feeding off a string of empty sporting calendars that go all the way back to 1948, the last time the Indians were world champions, and 1964, the last time any team from Cleveland won a pro title.

The only holdout was a prominent fellow named LeBron, who sported a Yankees cap that no doubt will inspire Travis Hafner to sit courtside next door at the Quicken Loans Arena sometime this winter wearing a Tim Duncan jersey. Everyone else seemed ready to blow a hole through the sky with their voiceboxes.

Only, in the fifth inning, it all began to crumble on them. The Yankees had two runs in, only one out. They had the bases loaded, since even Sabathia wants no part of Alex Rodriguez, and intentionally walked him. The Jake was eerily quiet and still. How often have the Yankees done this to upstart teams, and upstart towns? Lull them to sleep. Then plunge an ice pick in their hearts.

Sabathia talked to himself on the mound: “Just try to get out of the inning with a lead.”

Then threw three straight balls to Jorge Posada, the second-most-valuable player in the AL this year.

“As a hitter,” Posada would say, “that’s all you ask for.”

Posada got the green light on 3-and-0. It was a good pitch, a fat pitch, and he just missed it, fouling it off. He swung at strike two. Fouled off another. Then saw a pitch that his eyes told him might have been a little north of the strike zone. But Posada knows Froemming’s strike zone, knows if the retiring ump gives any ground at all, it’s up in the zone. He swung. He missed.

“If you’re gonna walk back to the dugout,” he would say, “you want to walk back knowing you took your best shot at it.”

You couldn’t know it, not yet, but the Yankees’ evening expired right there. Hideki Matsui popped out, ending the inning. The Indians came back and applied the final peltings of a slaughter on Chien-Ming Wang, kept thumping the Yankee bullpen, settled for a 12-3 win and a 1-0 lead in this best-of-five AL Division Series.

The Jake? Well, the sky remained whole. For now. If the Tribe does the same thing tonight, there are no guarantees.

Just as there were no guarantees last night. In baseball, in October, there are no such things. The Yankees did what they wanted, they made Sabathia throw 114 pitches, made him throw until his arm was dangling by a few stitches of yarn, got him out of there by the sixth inning. And still lost the game by nine runs.

“We made them work,” Joe Torre said. “But he was better than we were. He was able to battle through it.”

So now there is a must game tonight, there is Andy Pettitte and all the Game 2 wonders he has spun across the years, there will be another 44,000 on hand, and all that Cleveland angst dating back 59 years. The Yankees have lost enough series in which they won Game 1 – 2005 against the Angels, 2006 against the Tigers – to know this was just an opening salvo.

But they’ve also won their share of three-game sweeps to know that tonight, following the letter of the game plan won’t be enough, not if it yields the wrong kind of result.

“We did everything right,” Damon said, “except win the game.”

Once, that’s a quirky oddity. Do it twice and you might be staring straight into the abyss.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com