WORLD SERIES: ATLANTA BRAVES vs. CLEVELAND INDIANS : BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : Spot on Hot Seat Often Leaves Him Feeling a Chill

The World Series produced another hot seat on a cold night for Cleveland Indian Manager Mike Hargrove on Tuesday.

Win a hundred games in the regular season. Defeat the Boston Red Sox and Seattle Mariners in qualifying for the Series.

Hargrove obviously had to do more than push buttons, or did he?

Debatable decisions in each of the first three games of the Series has left Hargrove vulnerable to the second guess.

That’s part of the job, Hargrove was saying even before Game 3 served to stoke the flames.

“Baseball is built on the second guess,” he said.

“Everyone, from the bat boy to the media to the guy next door, thinks he knows more than the manager.

“You can’t let it affect you. You can’t worry about it. You have to know your players and never put them in a position they can’t handle.

“You have to believe in yourself.”

The wind chill was 29 degrees as the World Series returned to Cleveland for the first time in 41 years.

The reaction of a Jacobs Field crowd of 43,584 to Hargrove’s decision to stay with starting pitcher Chuck Nagy as the Atlanta Braves slowly erased 4-1 and 5-2 deficits was even chillier than that.

Hargrove and the Indians survived, winning, 7-6, in 11 innings, to reduce the Braves’ lead in the best-of-seven Series to 2-1.

It was a victory the Indians had to have, of course, which is why Hargrove ultimately had to let relief ace Jose Mesa throw 51 pitches over three innings of a tied game.

The 11th, Hargrove said, was going to be Mesa’s last inning, even if the Indians didn’t win it in the bottom half.

Can he come back today?

“We’ll look at it then,” Hargrove said. “He’s a big strong guy who has been resilient all year.

“We had no choice but to stay with him. If we didn’t win tonight, we might as well have gone home. I didn’t want to try and come back from 0-3.”

Mesa was brought in to start the ninth, after the Braves had scored three runs in the eighth to take a 6-5 lead.

Nagy, pitching for the first time in 11 days, led, 4-1, when Fred McGriff homered in the sixth and, 5-2, when Ryan Klesko homered in the seventh.

The crowd hooted impatiently when Marquis Grissom opened the eighth with a double and Luis Polonia followed with a run-scoring single, making it 5-4.

Hargrove was greeted with derisive cheers when he emerged at this point to lift right-hander Nagy in favor of left-hander Paul Assenmacher.

“Nagy had thrown only 81 pitches going into the eighth,” Hargrove explained later. “He had gotten a couple of them up to McGriff and Klesko, but otherwise he was still throwing well and had handled Grissom and Polonia all night.

“Rather than go to the bullpen and burn a right-hander for two hitters before going to Assenmacher, we elected to give Nagy the two more hitters.

“It didn’t work out, but I’d make the decision again.”

The Braves ultimately scored two more runs against Assenmacher and Julian Taverez before Cleveland tied it at 6-6 in the bottom of that inning, creating an unusual and extended battle of relief aces: Mesa against Mark Wohlers.

The three-inning stint was Mesa’s second-longest of a season in which he saved 46 games and pitched more than one inning only four times in 62 appearances.

Hargrove has consistently called his bullpen the strongest and deepest in the American League, which compounded the confusion when he refused to call on it with a clean slate and a 5-3 lead starting the eighth or refused to break with his regular-season pattern of seldom calling on Mesa before the ninth.

In Game 1, with the score tied, 1-1, in the seventh inning and the bases loaded for Atlanta, Hargrove had played his infield back, willing to give up the go-ahead run even though the Indians were playing on the road and Greg Maddux was pitching a dominant game for Atlanta.

Hargrove got the ground ball in that situation, but his infield failed to turn the double play, and the Braves ultimately scored two runs in the inning and prevailed, 3-2, after which several of the Cleveland players questioned their manager’s refusal to play the infield in.

“I could have made the play we needed to make,” shortstop Omar Vizquel said later, meaning he could have thrown home for the force play at the plate on the grounder by Polonia, rather than going for a double play.

In Game 2, Hargrove also stayed with an obviously struggling starter, Dennis Martinez, and allowed Martinez to pitch to Javier Lopez with a runner at third and the game tied, 2-2, in the sixth, and the weak hitting Rafael Belliard up next, followed by the pitcher’s spot. Lopez, who had flied to the warning track in his previous at bat, slugged a two-run homer for a 4-2 lead in a game the Braves won, 4-3.

The second-guessers were at it again Tuesday night, but Hargrove had a last laugh of sorts, although he returns to that hot seat again tonight with his team still on the ropes.