MLB

Pelfrey acts like ace in Mets’ win over Giants

Mike Pelfrey’s stomach virus is history and maybe, too, the nausea he was giving his manager every fifth day.

Yesterday the right-hander pitched a Cinco de Masterpiece. That meant working into the eighth inning for the first time this year. It meant working with confidence and getting the Mets a victory to conclude a three-game series against the defending champions.

“Nice and easy and almost effortless,” Pelfrey said after the Mets beat the Giants 5-2 at Citi Field. “When you have games like that, you come out and you’re not really sore — your body is not really sore.”

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In his best start of the season, Pelfrey allowed two runs, one earned, on four hits over 72⁄3 innings. It came on the heels of the stink bomb he ignited last Friday, when a still-ailing Pelfrey convinced manager Terry Collins to give him the ball then surrendered four runs over 41⁄3 innings in a Philly Flop.

Pelfrey (2-3, 6.06 ERA) still has to assemble a string of successful starts before he can be considered cured from the April blahs, but the Mets saw positive signs yesterday.

“I thought in the seventh and eighth innings he actually had as good a stuff as he had the whole game,” Collins said. “His ball had great movement, he was locating it. This is a great start for Mike and hopefully gets him on track.”

A day after getting tortured by Tim Lincecum in a 2-0 loss, the Mets were thrilled to see Jonathan Sanchez, who needed a GPS to locate the strike zone over five innings. The lefty walked six batters and allowed five hits.

Jose Reyes smashed a two-run triple in the second inning after a run already had scored on Ronny Paulino’s double play ball. Carlos Beltran delivered a two-run homer in the fifth, accounting for the final Mets’ scoring.

It got dicey in the ninth, when Francisco Rodriguez loaded the bases with one out before striking out Miguel Tejada and retiring pinch-hitter Buster Posey. Rodriguez, who had entered to get the final out in the eighth after Pelfrey’s departure, threw 42 pitches in earning his seventh save.

Pelfrey, working for the first time with Paulino behind the plate, sent an early message he felt strong. Seven of the first nine outs he recorded were by the groundout or strikeout. The Giants got a run on Mike Fontenot’s homer in the fourth and an unearned run, following Reyes’ throwing error on the Sanchez’s RBI single in the fifth.

“Early on in the game, mechanically I felt awesome, and that allowed me to put the ball where I wanted,” Pelfrey said. “We were working the inner part of the plate a lot and I was able to get it there.

“In the middle innings I worked a little too hard, trying to do too much, and then I thought in the seventh and the eighth it clicked again and I got back to what I was doing early in the game and not try to do too much, and I thought the command got better.”

Pelfrey’s next scheduled start will come Tuesday at Coors Field, where last April he fired seven shutout innings. So maybe the Mets have a reason for optimism.

“I think he’s just starting to have a feel for it,” Collins said. “I know he had a real bad month last year [in July] and maybe that’s the month he had in April this year. Put it behind him and move forward from that.”

mpuma@nypost.com