Expos Hermanson makes quick jump from rotation to bullpen

SAN FRANCISCO - Expos pitcher Dustin Hermanson spends a fair amount of time shaping his goatee, making sure the little wedges below the corners of his mouth are just so, and that the line from his bottom lip to his chin is never too wide or changes direction halfway down his face. He wants to look, you know, menacing without being ostentatious.

After all, the man is a closer now, and appearances seem to count for more when you're always on call.

''This is great,'' he smiled after he polished off his fourth save Tuesday night in Montreal's 3-2 win over the Giants. ''To be able to come here every day with a chance to play ... it was kind of hard for me before, when I knew I wasn't going to play four days in a row.''

Hermanson, you see, is making the transition to closer from the farthest conceivable place in the baseball universe - opening day starter. Indeed, there is no record in recent baseball history of a man going from throwing the first pitch of the new season to throwing the last pitch of a game every other day or so.

Hermanson became the Expos closer when Ugueth Urbina went down two weeks ago with an outraged elbow. Because Hermanson had been the team's best starting pitcher, the idea seemed far too weird for any orthodox manager to consider, let alone endorse. It was, surely, the kind of zany concept that has made Expos manager Felipe Alou something of a cult figure in the industry.

If only it had been that inspired.

''I think people want to think that way, but we've been working for a while on this,'' Alou said, rubbing his face the way professional sages used to do in the Middle Ages. ''When we traded for him, we traded for a stopper.''

That was three years ago, but by the time spring training broke in 1998, he was the key figure in the Expos' rotation.

''We saw that he needed to pitch a lot of innings,'' Alou said. ''He was inexperienced, real green, so we made him a starter to get as much experience as he could. Then Urbina became one of the best closers in baseball, so we left 'Hermie' where he was. But we had no doubts when we decided to move him.''

And Hermanson had no doubts about where his baseball soul was. It was all about walking in with two outs in the eighth inning with Marvin Benard at second base in a one-run game, catching a blue-trailed dart from Jeff Kent to end the threat, and walking off the mound like he had just struck out one of the neighborhood kids in an impromptu Wiffle Ball game.

And then breezing through the ninth by throwing nine strikes in 10 pitches and striking out the last two men he faced.

Indeed, he has the walk you want to see in your modern-day, geeked-up closer, and he is learning how to channel that geeked-up feeling.

''I've been struggling some since I became a closer because for me, I get too excited,'' he said. ''I would come in and try to do too much. The last time I pitched (Saturday against Houston in an 8-7 win), I relaxed until I got to 0-2, and then I tried to hump it up again and got in trouble. Tonight, I just calmed down and just used what I came out there with.''

What is more, there is reason to think that if Hermanson takes to the job as he did Tuesday night (''I think he can be better,'' Alou swears, ''I think he can throw harder.'') that Urbina may not get his job back. Alou is doing what smart managers do, letting the decision come to him.

Still, if Hermanson is as his face advertises, maybe Alou will have to tweak his version of events a little bit, the way Hollywood tweaks books it turns into movies. Maybe if the Expos stay in the race deep into the season, he'll have to go from, ''Oh, we'd been working toward this for a while,'' to ''When Urbina went down, I saw a vision of Hermanson in my sleep, and everyone else thought I was mad, but I knew I was not hallucinating, and ... ''

After all, even genius is said to be 90 percent preparation. Plus, it could be a hell of a wacky story by the time the national media gets its jaws into it.

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.