MLB

Sticking with Swish pays off for Yanks

PHILADELPHIA — This might well have been the game when we saw for the very first time what Joe Girardi’s best qualities as a manager really are. Girardi has spent an awful lot of his first postseason on the witness stand, asked to defend himself and his methods and his occasional heavy hands, bathed in the bright light of interrogation.

But the truth of it is, a manager’s strengths and weaknesses rarely are crystallized through the simple prism of moves made and moves skipped. We learned that with Joe Torre, saw the power of proper communication, witnessed how far earning absolute trust and respect really can go in a clubhouse. Torre won four titles that way.

Joe Girardi is now halfway to his first for employing the same tactic.

So much of this 8-5 Yankees’ victory in Game 3 of the 105th World Series can be attributed to a single word that Torre used to employ with reverence and regularity: trust. There was a regular coterie of players Girardi would lean on in the regular season, an array of trusted lieutenants who helped get the Yankees to this cusp of paradise.

Nick Swisher was one of them.

Joba Chamberlain was one of them.

Both have had their struggles this postseason, to the point where it wasn’t an unreasonable question to ask if they shouldn’t have their places of prominence marginalized, or at least significantly reduced. Swisher hadn’t hit a lick all October; Joba’s problem was the exact opposite. It seemed every time he chucked a pitch toward home plate, someone was hitting the tar out of the ball. Even his outs were uncomfortably loud.

Girardi sat Swisher for the first time in Game 2 Thursday night.

“It was heartbreaking,” Swisher said last night. “I’m an emotional guy. You always know what I’m thinking. I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

Girardi also kept Chamberlain and his other wunderkind setup kid, Phil Hughes, in the bullpen in that same game, bypassing the bridge from A.J. Burnett to Mariano Rivera and using an express lane. Some managers see a hot hand, they play that hot hand as long as they can.

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Girardi?

“Swish has been doing it for us all year,” Girardi said. “He’s been a really good player for us. ”

Swisher was back in the lineup last night, and at first things didn’t go well. He flied out his first at-bat in the second, and in the bottom of the inning he seemed to give up on a ball off the bat of Pedro Feliz that that he might have been able to catch had he taken a better route on the ball.

More October miseries. And you could hear the snickers everywhere.

Then, something funny happened: with the Yankees having sliced a 3-0 lead to 3-2, Swisher led off the fifth with a double that hugged the third-base line. It was just his second extra-base hit of the postseason in 37 at-bats, but it set the stage for a three-run outburst that wrested the lead away from the Phillies for good. An inning later, he slammed a home run to left that added the first of three insurance runs, just his second RBI of the playoffs.

And suddenly Girardi wasn’t a stubborn martinet refusing to alter his thinking; he was a loyal skipper who had danced with the girl who brung him.

“It’s really good,” Girardi said of the satisfaction that filled him watching Swisher break out at last.

And sometimes, a rite so simple really does yield dividends.

“I credit my teammates and I credit my manager,” Swisher said. “They never lost faith in me.”

Same deal with Chamberlain, who came into a three-run game in the eighth facing 1, 2 and 3 in the Phillies lineup, and he blitzed through Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Chase Utley on just nine pitches.

The playoffs can be such a wonderful laboratory for redemption. All it takes is one swing, or one strikeout, and you can induce amnesia on the masses. Alex Rodriguez proved that — or re-proved it — in the fourth, when he hit an opposite-field homer that clanged off an out-of-use TV camera and changed the tenor of the game — and instantly made everyone forget the 0-for-8, six-strikeout strait jacket he had brought into the game.

It doesn’t always work, though. Hughes came in, gave up a home run, and was exiled again, maybe for good. But that’s also part of the manager’s deal: not all of your moves have to work. Just enough of them.

Hamels lets down Manuel once again

Now we know what Charlie Manuel knew. Now we have seen what Charlie Manuel saw. Manuel was roasted pretty good for opting to start Pedro Martinez in Game 2 of the World Series, opting to keep Cole Hamels back until Game 3, and this seemed crazy in a lot of precincts.

Why expose Pedro to Yankee Stadium? Why not get Hamels, a lefty, the start at Yankee Stadium? Wasn’t he the MVP of the World Series last year?

Last year’s MVP has been DOA in these playoffs, though. And last night we saw just how maddening that can be. He had a no-hitter entering the fourth, didn’t get a call on a full-count pitch to Mark Teixeira and then went completely off the deep end. Five of the next eight hitters got hits. Five runs scored. Even Andy Pettitte reached him for the hit that officially erased what had been a 3-0 Phillies lead.

It did seem a bit odd that Hamels — who blitzed through the first three innings relying mainly on fastballs and changeups, his two money pitches — wound up getting crushed by two terrible curveballs. One was inexplicable, a hanger to Johnny Damon that Damon hit to the gap to give the Yankees a 5-3 lead. The other was unforgivable, to Pettitte two hitters earlier.

It was poor judgment and poor execution and it doomed Hamels.

Smile for the camera

Alex Rodriguez was the first player to have a home run reviewed by replay last year in Tampa, and last night he was the first to ever have one reviewed in the World Series. Not surprising. He is pretty self-centaured. . . . Andy Pettitte’s “B” move to first is better than the “A” move of 95 percent of the pitchers in MLB, and never fails to pick me off in the press box fewer than three times a game. . . . You think the Mets have had a rough patch? You realize the Phillies had losing records in 30 of the 31 seasons between 1918 and 1948?

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com