We know baseball is a cruel game. It’s always a cruel game, has always been a cruel game.

“Baseball,” Bart Giamatti once famously wrote, “breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart.”

The Yankees’ Oswaldo Cabrera has been a quick study in his first 60 days as a major leaguer. He showed up with a major league walk and a big league attitude. He never once looked wide-eyed. His makeup screamed “I belong!” long before he proved he belonged.

But the lessons are plentiful for a rookie, and he received another one Saturday night. Baseball — as Bob Murphy always said — is “a game of redeeming features.” It allows you immediate opportunity to make right your mistakes, to own up to your failures. But it doesn’t guarantee them to you.

In Game 3 of the AL Division Series on Saturday in Cleveland, Cabrera smoked a double with one out in the third inning, the Yankees’ first hit off the Guardians’ Triston McKenzie. Two batters later, he joined in a tour of the basepaths after Aaron Judge clobbered a home run (his 63rd since the start of the regular season), snapping an 0-for-9 slump in the ALDS and erasing the Guardians’ early 2-0 lead.

Two innings later, it was Cabrera’s time to homer, crushing a McKenzie four-seamer 409 feet over the right-field wall, giving the Yankees a 4-2 lead.

It sure looked like Cabrera had helped save the day for the Yankees in their first must-have game of the season. It came a day after his 0-for-5, three-strikeout mess was compounded by his 10th-inning misplay of a Jose Ramirez bloop to left field that helped set up the Guardians’ game-winning rally.

“That type of guy that I was in the game today is not the guy that I’ve always been,” Cabrera said after the game Friday, proving he is every bit as precocious at self-evaluation as he is on the field. “Just trying to get that consistency again and just be me.”

That was the redeeming-features part of the program.

Here came the cruelty:

Bottom of the ninth of Game 3, one out: Cleveland’s Myles Straw served a ball that looked eerily — spookily — similar to the one Ramirez had hit about 29 hours earlier. Maybe Cabrera got a slow jump on the ball, maybe he didn’t. But as with the play Friday, he compounded not catching the ball by not keeping it in front of him.

Friday, that helped Ramirez land on third. Saturday, it permitted Shaw to take second even though he initially was going to play it safe and stay anchored at first.

Cabrera, an infielder by trade, has made a remarkable transition to the outfield, and he made a fine leaping play in Game 1. If things had broken properly, his misadventure Saturday would have been a mere footnote, something his teammates would’ve kidded him about late, along the lines of: “Easy game, eh, kid?”

But the fact is, that play helped nudge open the door. There were a lot of other co-conspirators in kicking that door down as the ninth inning progressed, capped by Oscar Gonzalez’s two-out, two-strike, two-run single that finished off an improbable, borderline impossible, 6-5 Guardians victory.

There were relievers Wandy Peralta and Clarke Schmidt, who could only retire one of the final six Guardians they faced in the ninth. There was the intrigue surrounding the he-said/he-said of manager Aaron Boone (who said presumptive closer Clay Holmes wasn’t available) and Holmes (who insisted he most certainly was).

All of that happened. None of it helped.

But Cabrera was part of it too, every bit as much as he was a part of all the good stuff that preceded it, breaking out of his own 0-for-8 slump in this series. He punctuated the home run by observing every inch of its flight (Reggie would’ve been proud) and by flipping his bat like a decathlete tossing a javelin. Not everyone will be in love with that.

But it is in keeping with who he has been since he first showed up in the Yankees’ clubhouse on Aug. 17. He’s a rookie who carried all of 154 at-bats into this series. He has the confidence of his teammates and of Boone, who said of his ninth-inning adventure: “I love what I’ve seen of Oswaldo out there.”

On Friday, Cabrera said: “Tomorrow is another day. This is the most beautiful part of baseball.”

It’s also the painful part. It’s a cruel game. It’s designed to break your heart.