Just as part of the standard housekeeping, one media member today asked Manny Acta about the progress of pitcher Shawn Hill, who was due to return (after recovering from a long, mysterious forearm injury) in mid-September.

Acta's response, when asked about Hill.

"He's done."

Done for the season.

Hill, who was in Viera, Fla., working on a rehab/pitching program, felt elbow soreness and swelling -- a setback that ends this arduous comeback attempt and, frankly, puts his future with the team in doubt. GM Jim Bowden said he's "concerned" for Hill's career. Hill hasn't pitched for the Nats this year since June 24 -- he was shut down after that, and ordered onto a program of rest and rehab; no surgery -- but now, the team is terming this a new injury.

Tomorrow, Hill will be examined by Dr. James Andrews in Pensacola, Fla.

"This is a new injury to our knowledge," Bowden said. "Again, I'll wait for Dr. Andrews to really give us the report."

Here is an excerpt from the Q&A session with many Acta today.

You have to feel for Hill, who's never really learned the root cause of all the pain in his pitching arm. Now, Acta is talking about him in the same breath as John Patterson. Not good at all.

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Q: Update on Shawn Hill?

He's done. He took a step back in his rehab where he was having a little soreness on his forearm and in the elbow area, and he's going to be seen by Dr. [James] Andrews again.

Q: How mysterious is this injury? Nobody can really find the problem

Mysterious. I mean, I'm not going to go into details at medical stuff, but it is mysterious - the fact that you do get MRIs and all that stuff and it's supposed to be strong and he still feels pain there.

Q: The step back was what, in particular?

Soreness. He was doing very well throughout the whole throwing program, and just a couple days ago he felt soreness in that area again.

Q: How far along was he before that?

He had already thrown a bullpen (session).

Q: Just from a personal standpoint, having seen Shawn and what he looks like at his best, how bad do you feel about what he's going through now?

I have felt bad for him for the last four years, because, I mean, even since we were in Montreal, this guy has been battling injuries. I hope he overcomes all this. You know, you're always going to wonder what he could have done if he had stayed healthy and what kind of pitcher, what kind of impact he could have made. Because some of us that saw Hill when he was healthy pitching and on his game, he looked like a pretty solid No. 3 guy on a winning ballclub.

Q: So next year, you can't really count on him being ready to perform. How do you handle that?

We handle that the same way we did this spring and last year with him and Patterson. We didn't go in there counting on them. If they were fine, it was a bonus, but we were prepared. That's why we brought all those guys to camp.

Just one note, along with tonight's lineups. In the last two games, the two Washington starters, Collin Balester and Tim Redding, have earned wins. Tonight John Lannan tries to make it three wins in a row for Nats starters. Not since July 31-August 2, 2007, have Washington starters won games three times in a row. The last trio to do it? Matt Chico, Lannan, and Mike Bacsik.

Tonight's lineups

Los Angeles

Kemp - 8
Ethier - 9
Ramirez - 7
Kent - 4
Loney - 3
Blake - 5
Ardoin - 2
Berroa - 6
Kershaw - 1

Washington

Hernandez - 4
Guzman - 6
Zimmerman - 5
Milledge - 8
Belliard - 3
Dukes - 9
Harris - 7
Nieves - 2
Lannan - 1

One day sure produced plenty of thread to play with. Ryan Zimmerman hit his first home run yesterday since May 17. The Nats won their second consecutive one-run game against a team in (formerly in?) the playoff chase. They defeated a Hall of Fame pitcher. Their new closer held on once again.

But as far as I'm concerned, the most interesting thing to come out of yesterday's affairs -- and perhaps the most pertinent to the team's future composition -- was the announcement that Rick Eckstein will join the coaching staff come September 1.

Eckstein, after all, is a hitting coach.

Jim Bowden spoke about Eckstein yesterday as a future big-league coach. A permanent one.

And the Nats current batting coach, Lenny Harris, has had his job security scrutinized almost from the moment the season began.

Eckstein rejoined the organization after spending one year with the Class AAA affiliate in St. Louis. But this year, he was working with the Class AAA Columbus hitters -- and did his most noticeable work with Ryan Langerhans, helping him shorten his swing and giving him the foundation to finally be an adequate major league hitter.

Here is Eckstein's bio, from the Clippers' Web site.

Also note, this is not his first go-round as a hitting coach with a major league club. Last year he joined the Cardinals during September.

The lineups, folks.

Also, I just got off the field, where a gang of reporters nearly confused Jim Bowden with Manny Ramirez. Bowden wore long, thick dreadlocks -- a la Manny -- underneath a Nationals cap. Plenty can be said of Bowden, but don't call him boring.

And let me add some tidbits on the pitching matchup. The meeting between Tim Redding and Greg Maddux presents an interesting dichotomy. Redding's career descent into the minor leagues -- and the subsequent rise into the Washington rotation -- is well documented. And Maddux? Perhaps you've heard of him. Or maybe you just remember him as a contributor in this commercial.

Redding has 1-5 with a 6.63 ERA since the all-star break, but he hasn't faced many from the Los Angeles lineup during his career. That may give him a boost early, when the Dodgers take time to adjust. (Not that a guy like Manny Ramirez needs much time to make adjustments.) Let's see how Redding fares in the third, fourth and fifth innings.

Maddux, meanwhile, hasn't won a game (0-6) against an NL East team this season. The future Hall of Famer is new in Dodger blue -- new for this season, at least -- having been acquired last week for his second stint with the club in the past two years. He was added as a final piece to possibly catapult the team into the playoffs. Tonight, he will just be trying to help Los Angeles break its funk; the Dodgers have lost five of their last seven and are losing sight of first place Arizona in the NL West.

Dodgers
Kemp -- 8
Ethier -- 9
Kent -- 4
Ramirez -- 7
Loney -- 3
Martin -- 2
Garciaparra -- 6
Blake -- 5
Maddux -- 1

Nationals
Harris -- 7
Guzman -- 6
Zimmerman -- 5
Milledge -- 8
Belliard -- 3
Flores -- 2
Dukes -- 9
Bonifacio -- 4
Redding -- 1

(There were some glitches with the NJ last night -- all of them my doing, I'm sure -- which is why some of you may have had difficulty commenting. My bad. We should be on track tonight.)

-- Mark Viera

As Stephen Hunter wrote in the Post's Style section yesterday, even losing baseball is sometimes worth all the effort and woe -- so long as you know the right reasons to care. Now I'm not trying to channel Hunter here, or even redirect this thesis (because, here, I'm diverging from his revel-in-hate recommendation), but last night's game represented the kind of self-contained drama that even a losing team gets to have once in a while, the kind of drama that doesn't need the relevance of a pennant chase to be riveting.

In the end, the game is still the game, and every game stands alone. And when a team patches together eight fantastic innings, it needs to finish the ninth. Joel Hanrahan needed it to test himself as Washington's closer. The Nats needed it because they hadn't won at home in about three weeks.

In the ninth last night, Hanarahan provided much of the drama by himself. He threw 25 pitches, trying to protect a 2-1 lead. And how to describe it? Excruciating? Riveting? Perhaps he should have handed out free doses of Novocain to anybody watching. After recording the first out of the inning on a grounder, Hanrahan promptly walked as close to the cliff's edge as you can get without tumbling.

He was throwing smoke, just not with accuracy. In the inning, according to the numbers compiled by brooksbaseball.net, Harnahan threw 16 fastballs (average speed, 96.8!) and nine sliders. Nothing else. When things started getting really bumpy, he basically stopped even throwing sliders. He was desperate just to get the ball over the plate. He missed with pitches that were a foot high, a foot in.

With Hanrahan, we've seen the spastic control problems before.

But here, we saw him escape.

After getting the Nomar Garciaparra groundout on a full count pitch, Hanrahan gave up a hard single to center by Casey Blake. One on.

Then, Hanrahan walked Mark Sweeney on five pitches. Two on.

Uh oh.

Then, in what was probably the most critical at bat of the game, Hanrahan faced Matt Kemp. And he started out 1-0, 2-0... then 3-1. Nothing but fastballs. He was basically saying, I'll lose with a hit, but damn if I lose with more walks. The last pitch he threw to Kemp, with the count full, was right on the inside corner of the plate.

Kemp popped it up to center.

One batter later (yeah, Hanrahan fell behind there 2-0 as well), he induced an easy groundout.

Game over, breath out.

No other sport makes you hold it as long as baseball does.

---

A few additional links...

For today's notebook, courtesy of Mark Viera, click here.

If you're interested in the instant replay piece I wrote, click here.

Oh, and remember, we're chatting today at 2 p.m.

Elijah Dukes should be at Nationals Park for tomorrow's game after being brought up from Class AAA Columbus. It was sort of easy to see the writing on the wall with this when Austin Kearns's injury was announced earlier today. But the Nats PR staff made it official before Manny Acta's post-game news conference.

Dukes, you will remember, has been on the farm rehabbing a right calf strain. He was placed on the 15-day disabled list Aug. 7 with the injury. He has missed a combined 72 games during three trips to the disabled list this season.

-- Mark Viera

As mentioned, Major League Baseball will be implementing replay starting Thursday. Lots of people were talking about it, mainly becuase the media dopes like myself wanted to know everyone's opinion. (I've never heard the phrase slippery slope uttered so many times in succession; it turned into the token follow-up question.)

Here's what some people were saying today at Nats Park:

Nationals Manager Manny Acta
What do you think?
I like it. I think they made the right decision when it comes to only being home runs foul or fair because the new dimensions and the way the new stadiums are built makes it very tough on the umpires. I believe that that's the only part where they're going to be taking the human element part of the game. So I like it.

When do you like human element?
Its been done for over 100 years and I think you just ant take it away. I don't know, maybe in 100 years we're going to have a machine calling balls and strikes, but I don't want to see that. You just cant play the game like that because the game, there's too many continuations in place and you don't have the time to stop at the board and look at th computer telling you if you're safe or out.

Worry about slippery slope?
I don think they're going to go any farther I think this is pretty cut and dry and I think ppl will resist any other implement.

Dodgers Manager Joe Torre
Like it?
You want to get it right and I think all the umpires, I think maybe a number of years ago umpires were a little stubborn about asking for help but I think you've seen more over the last 15 years more guys getting together talking about things. . . . Just the fact they're trying to get it right, when it's something like a home run or fair-foul call . . . I think it makes sense.

Worry about slippery slope?
It's tough to overturn safe and out then you'll get in to ball and strike and then all of the sudden people have to pack more than a lunch to get here to the ballpark.

Washington National Aaron Boone
What's your take?
Fine. I'm kind indifferent. Done right on a small level, I guess I like it.

Why?
If you have a chance to get a fair or foul call right, u may as well get it right and it doesn't affect if this runner or all that kind a stuff. Done right on a limited basis and I like it.

What's different from a home run call or a safe-out call?
On the surface, I guess u can't really justify one or the other. It just seems to me in baseball, umpires are there to make judgments. I think fair and foul on home runs sometimes it's a missable call. So I think you may as well get that right if you can.

Nationals General Manager Jim Bowden
What do you think?
I've always been a big supporter of instant replay. I think Major League Baseball and the umpires association have done a tremendous job putting together a good plan to make it work and be successful. I think its great knowing we can got into the offseason and if there's a call that's made wrong because of human error we have a chance to correct it and have a team lose a very important playoff game because of it.

Slippery slope?
I think everything in life, when you develop something 10 years down the road we'll all find a better way to do it. But I think the approach everyone's taking, and making it only on home run calls, is the right thing to make. .... Like everything else we'll just adjust if we can find better ways to do it.

But you do like it?
I've always been a fan of it since the first year I was a GM. It was voted down 27-to-1 back then. They all kinda laughed at me.

-- Mark Viera

The lineups, folks.

Oh, and a quick note about tonight. Remember the last time Derek Lowe faced the Nationals? It looked something like this: 8 INN, 1 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 4 K. Buckle up.

Oh, and another quick note. As I'm sure you've heard, Major League Baseball has approved the use of instant replay effective Thursday. People were talking about it today at Nats Park, and I'm hoping to post some of those comments later tonight.

Dodgers
Kemp -- 8
Ethier -- 9
Kent -- 4
Ramirez -- 7
Loney -- 3
Martin -- 2
Garciaparra -- 6
Blake -- 5
Lowe -- 1

Nationals
Harris -- 7
Guzman -- 6
Zimmerman -- 5
Milledge -- 8
Belliard -- 3
Flores -- 2
Langerhans -- 9
Bonifacio -- 4
Balester -- 1

-- Mark Viera

The Nationals this afternoon placed RF Austin Kearns on the disabled list, retroactive to August 25, with a stress fracture of his left foot. Kearns is expected to miss two to four weeks.

The release the team just issued mentioned that the injury originally occurred on August 3, a game in which Kearns went 3-for-4 against Cincinnati. (I am trying to think of any red flags from that game, but I am coming up short. He played the entire game, and didn't miss any time in the games following.)

Anyway, Kearns was examined yesterday in DC by orthopedist Edward Magur, who recommended rest and immobilization with a walking cast.

And with that, Kearns is heading to the DL for the second time this year. He already missed 38 games earlier this season after right elbow surgery.

For what it's worth -- and by no means am I trying to draw a correlation between performance and injury; just speculating -- Kearns has batted .172 (11-for-64) since August 4, a day after the foot injury purportedly occurred. For the season, his numbers stand at .217 with seven HRs and 32 RBIs.

No corresponding roster move has yet been announced, but Elijah Dukes, currently on rehab with Class AAA Columbus, would be the logical man to return.

About an injury (or many): For the off-day feature, I tried to touch on the basic question that fans have been asking all season. That is, what the heck happened with all these injuries, and could any of them have been prevented?

"It's the same inquiry we subject ourselves to," Dr. Ben Shaffer told me. "You're asking the same questions we ask."

You can read more here, but I wanted to add a little background on the blog about one of the more ambiguous, and ultimately severe, injuries this season. Wily Mo Pena, in July, had surgery to repair a partially torn rotator cuff, as well as a tear and fraying of his posterior labrum. That put his season to a merciful rest. When Dr. Tim Kremchek performed the surgery, he was stunned that Pena had been playing for so long in his given condition.

"I don't think it was expected to be that severe," Jim Bowden said at the time. "The doctors do not understand how he could have swung a baseball bat. They have absolutely no idea. . . . The doctors were absolutely amazed that he was on the field."

So yesterday, I asked Shaffer how it was possible that Pena's injury could have been ignored for so long.

This is what he said:

* Based on all evidence, and based on Pena's recollection, the shoulder injury was actually something that had happened three years ago, while Pena was playing with Cincinnati. He'd rammed into the outfield wall while trying to catch a flyball, and that was the first time his shoulder started to hurt. But never, even at that time, did Pena go on the disabled list. The pain just became an inborn element of his day-to-day existence. And for a while, he could deal with it.

* But, Shaffer emphasized, baseball injuries often have a depletive aspect. Unlike in football, say, where you can get a guy ready to play for one day knowing he'll have six days to rest, baseball injuries are subject to constant grind.

* And with enough grinding, the injury never goes away. In Pena's case, it got worse gradually, leading to the inevitable endpoint.

"At some point," Shaffer said, "a guy just falls off the wagon... I don't know why it became so symptomatic that he finally had to get it fixed. But he'd been playing with the injury for 3-1/2 years."

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About a place to eat: Out of Chicago, and thus freed from the civic obligation that requires a two-inch thick cut of prime to dominate every plate, I took advantage of my free night in DC by meeting up with a buddy at Granville Moore's, a Belgian place that specializes in the holy trinity of delicacies: mussels, frites, and high-octane monk-brewed beer. Let me give a particular recommendation to frites, cut thick, fried to a crispy autumn brown, and bathed in heavy sea salt. We got there are 8:30 and waited 45 minutes for a table, but never regretted it. One of my favorite DC eating experiences so far.

(I'm saving Minibar for the end of the season, fellow foodies.)

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About a place that no longer exists: Starting yesterday, the Nationals fanbase lost perhaps its best remaining message board forum on the Web. What once stood as a multi-threaded shrine to discontent, hope and (sometimes-deserved) Washington Post-bashing has now been cleared into nothingness. I gotta say, the Ballpark Guys forum deserves a better epitaph than "404 Page Not Found."

I'll miss it. At its best, it was a place for ideas and laughs.

And no -- I never posted. Just read.

[UPDATE, 11:38 a.m.] Report of the Ballpark Guys' demise was premature. (See reader comments below.)