A's hope to see Cy Young riches from oft-injured Harden

Miller: Five things to know

PHOENIX -- They are just three little words, and placed together they comprise the most heartening, scary, exciting, worrisome, optimistic and jolting sentence to emerge from Oakland's camp -- maybe from any camp -- all spring:

"I feel great," right-hander Rich Harden says.

The A's are 21-7 when Rich Harden has started the past two seasons. (Getty Images)

He's smiling when he says them. It's no trick. There's no mirage. If the other shoe is waiting to drop -- and in the past, it has dropped with the force of a wrecking ball -- it is nowhere in sight when you look around.

"I'm ready to get the season started," Harden continues, and now it's almost just too much.

In one flip of the calendar year, the Swingin' A's move from the Big Hurt to the Big Tease, from Frank Thomas' thoroughly unexpected monster year at the plate to a kid with Cy Young potential and Cy Buzzard's luck.

What's tantalizing is how healthy and, yes, how thoroughly dominant Harden, 25, has been all spring.

"Cy Young stuff, without a doubt," says veteran one National League scout who has been watching the Athletics. "Fastball, slider, split, and you'd better swing at the first 95-mph fastball you see.

"Because if he gets ahead of you in the count, good luck."

What's scary is the thought of not only how dominant the kid could be if he could rack up a full season's worth of 33 or 34 starts ... but also the thought of how, with him, there is a muscle strain or sore elbow lurking around every dark corner.

"Unbelievable, unbelievable stuff. Even Huddy and Mulder used to say that as good a stuff as they had, he had better stuff than all of them," Oakland Gold Glove third baseman Eric Chavez says of one-time A's aces Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. "He's been sharp this spring.

"But him looking sharp has never been the problem. Him staying healthy has been the problem."

Oakland's 17th-round pick in the 2000 draft, Harden has made only 28 starts over the past two seasons combined. There were two strains -- left oblique and right lat -- and a sore elbow that limited him to nine starts last summer. There was the left shoulder subluxation that held him to 22 appearances -- 19 starts -- in 2005.

The aches and pains didn't start stacking up on him until 2005. Throughout his high school, community college and minor league career, he was fine.