Feeling many of his toes and some of his oats, Dallas Braden takes the mound for the A's today at 1:05pm, and things look only to get Wuertz from there. My revised "projected first week rotation order" looks like:
Sheets
Braden
Duchscherer
Anderson
Cahill or Gio
However, let's be honest: Duchscherer, who throws in a game for the first time tomorrow, will have 3 outings to get ready and it is no sure thing that he'll stay on track to make a big league start as soon as April 7th. So Trevor Cahill and Gio Gonzalez could well be fighting for 2 spots.
Today's starting lineups come courtesy of Susan Slusser, who is almost as funny as Harry Schulman:
Patterson - CF
Ellis - 2B
Suzuki - C
Kouzmanoff - 3B
Chavez - 1B
Sweeney - RF
Cust - DH
Buck - LF
Rosales - SS
Earlier today, the A's cut 9 players from camp: Corey Brown, Adrian Cardenas, Matt Carson, Lenny DiNardo, Josh Donaldson, Fernando Hernandez, Marcus McBeth, Gregorio Petit, and Eric Sogard. There is no word as to whether these guys were actually cut in alphabetical order.
In other news, John Meloan is going to have Tommy John surgery, and Joe Nathan thought that sounded so fun that he has decided to join Meloan. I'll bet Dr. Andrews wishes he hadn't really mailed out those "2 for 1" coupons.
