The Oakland Athletics host the Texas Rangers today at 12:05pm in their first matchup against one of their chief divisional foes of 2011. The A’s will be rolling out one of their more interesting lineups thus far, including David DeJesus, Hideki Matsui, Chris Carter, and prospect Jemile Weeks. However, as interesting as the lineup will be, today’s big news is the workouts of various Athletics pitchers.
The A’s have had some early spring training injury issues including pitchers Rich Harden, Andrew Bailey, and Craig Breslow among others. Harden had stiffness in a lat last month and had been shut down for a couple weeks. According to Susan Slusser Harden threw long toss today over a distance of 80 feet and said he felt good after the session. His plan over the coming days is, “He’ll do [long toss] several times, two days on, one off, then likely off the mound.”
Closer Andrew Bailey has been recovering from an offseason elbow procedure and threw 20 pitches to hitters, with a plan to do that again Monday before getting into game action. Relief pitcher Craig Breslow also threw 20 pitches of live batting practice.