Someone's going to die at a baseball stadium soon.

Might be a player. Could be an umpire. Possibly even a fan.

It almost was a coach.

The scar on Don Long's left cheek still puffs around the edges, fresh enough that it looks like a misplaced zipper instead of the mark of someone who lived too hard. Like every scar, this one has a story, and it involves a piece of shattered wood, about two pounds heavy, that tomahawked 30 feet before slicing through his face.

Nate McLouth thought he just missed the sweet spot of the bat. It was April 15, the eighth inning, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were getting pummeled at Dodger Stadium. Long, the Pirates' hitting coach, milled about the dugout until he heard McLouth hammer Esteban Loaiza's 0-2 pitch. Long looked up and tracked the ball down the right-field line. He had no idea baseball's greatest weapon was headed right at him, and that had he been positioned an inch to the left or right, he might not be here to talk about it.

About two or three

This is a monumental batch of letters. We cover complete games and their enemy, pitch counts, a ballplayer who wants to be an astronaut and another who's not giving up runs, and introduce a new segment that we're sure is going to be a regular so long as a particular team stays atop the National League Central.

Your words first, then mine in italics.

COMPLETE GAMES ("Lost art of pitching")

In your "Lost Art of Pitching" article, you completely ignore the largest factor. The shrinking strike zone is by far the largest factor in the diminution of innings.

Tony Muetz
Martinez, Calif.

Not sure about the largest, but it certainly was worth mentioning. It's too bad scorekeepers didn't keep track of balls and strikes until recent years, because it would be interesting to see whether the strike zone had any kind of effect.

Still, pitch counts are absolutely the No. 1 reason for the death of complete games. Managers are afraid to keep pitchers in because their bosses, general managers, are

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Ervin Santana is not supposed to be doing this. He should be on another team, or in the bullpen, or pitching only at home, or something other than throwing one of the most impressive games in the last two decades – yes, that's right – because pitchers who struggle like he did last year don't generally recover, let alone dominate.

All apologies to Brandon Webb, but through baseball's first five weeks, Santana has been its best pitcher, capped by his tour-de-force shutout Monday night in the Los Angeles Angels' 4-0 victory against Kansas City. Santana joined teammate Joe Saunders, his competition in spring training for the Angels' fifth-starter job, with a 6-0 record and best illustrates how Los Angeles can survive, let alone thrive, with the American League's top record while Nos. 1 and 2 starters John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar mire on the disabled list.

The growth of the 25-year-old Santana into himself – his body, now more a man's than a boy's, and his stuff, always

WASHINGTON – Stan Kasten's two families converged this week. Down south, his daughter graduated from the University of Florida. And here, where he's president of the Washington Nationals, his baby turned a month old.

Nationals Park, the city's $611 million gift to bring baseball back after a 34-year hiatus, is a perfectly acceptable new stadium. It is not transcendent like its Beltway neighbor, Camden Yards in Baltimore, and not a billion-dollar homage to gluttony like the new Yankee Stadium will be. It is a good place to take the family for $5 a ticket, grab a drink in the packed center-field bar, watch a footrace involving people wearing giant foam heads of dead presidents, ogle the HD video screen and soak in a gorgeous day like Sunday, when the sun beamed, a breeze whistled through the Southeast and the game-time temperature registered at 72.

Not even the perfect afternoon could fill the stadium for the second time, and it may be a while until the Nationals play to another sellout.

BALTIMORE – Troy Percival tried to explain the success of the Tampa Bay Rays, and he kept talking, like he needed to reinforce the whole believability of the thing, because the Rays have been baseball's real-life Charlie Brown, only with a rap sheet, and now they're headed to Boston this weekend with first place in the American League East on the line, the thought of which finally prompted him to pause, before finishing his soliloquy with this:

"And we haven't got Kazmir yet."

Two lockers over from Percival's, after the Rays' 4-2 victory to take a series from Baltimore, Scott Kazmir pulled on a dress shirt and readied for the trip to Boston. He rejoined the Rays earlier this week after missing the first month with a strain in his pitching elbow and was stunned at what he saw.

Success is to the Rays as taste is to tofu, and for them to sit atop the titan of baseball divisions percentage points ahead of the defending world champions – and three games up on the $200 million Yankees – in

ST. LOUIS – One day, he wants to go into space. Brian Barton turned 26 earlier this week, and though the astronaut dream tends to die about the time hormones bloom and adolescence rages, Barton never could abandon it.

"The sky's the limit," he likes to say, and in this instance, he does so standing in front of his locker in the St. Louis Cardinals' clubhouse. He takes the cliché literally and figuratively, the former in his desire to float in the atmosphere and the latter in the career he has carved out in the meantime.

The sky? It's for the African-American kid from South Los Angeles who grew up surrounded by basketball, football and everything but baseball. The one who didn't get drafted out of the University of Miami after a productive college career because teams were worried that he was going to finish his degree in aerospace engineering and hook on with Boeing, where he interned, or perhaps NASA. The one who later signed with the Cleveland Indians for $100,000, put up gaudy

Lee Elia called from a car chauffeuring him to his next appearance Monday. It was 2:40 p.m. in Chicago, and he already had done five radio shows and held court for a crowd at Harry Caray's steakhouse. He's 70, and it was a lot to pack into eight hours.

"Oh, heck," he said, "it's been quite a day."

Heck?

Uh, this is Lee Elia, right?

Sure as heck was, and it sounded odd, because the Lee Elia the world knew did not say heck. He did say something that ends with the same two letters, begins with an "F" and … well, you've got a one-in-26 shot at figuring out the other letter.

Twenty-five years ago Tuesday, he screeched 37 derivations of it over a 3-minute, 11-second tirade (Editor's note: Content contains explicit language that may offend.) against Chicago Cubs fans, a rant that lives on through the magic of MP3 and captures a man who bottled up his anger, let it fester and then, one day, could take it no longer.

Now, after years of running from his words, Elia is celebrating them with a

The complete game is on life support.

Don't mourn. It lived well. During its heyday, pitchers loved throwing it. In 1879, Will White started 75 games for the Cincinnati Reds and finished every one of them. More than 100 years later, Rick Langford threw 28 for the 1980 Oakland A's staff that pitched 94 complete games.

From there, it ran into trouble. Respiratory issues, arthritis, broken hip. You know. At the turn of the century, its descent into nothingness accelerated, and it might well be irrelevant now if not for the one pitcher who is legitimately capable of throwing a complete game every time out.

"I don't think it's something that will ever come back," Roy Halladay says, and even as the complete game's foremost – and lone, really – modern practitioner, he's a skeptic. It's a shame, too, because Halladay, the luminescent Toronto Blue Jays right-hander, is on the verge of doing what no pitcher has done since 2003: throw four straight complete games.

And who was that pitcher?

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