Depending on how the next seven days go, Rich Harden could make his next start a week from Monday. The A's young standout has not appeared in a game since Aug. 19, when he blanked the Royals through 6 1/3 innings to improve his record to 10-5 this year. The reason for his absence is a strained right lat muscle, an injury that was confirmed Wednesday with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. While the test confirmed what was already believed by A's head trainer Larry Davis, it also secretly benefited Harden by requiring him to rest. "[In order to perform the MRI], fluid gets put in your arm so that when you move it around, it squishes and it's not comfortable," explained Davis. "It changes the way that you inherently do things. What happens is the body absorbs all of that material before you can do anything again. The best thing about this injection is that it forces us to do what we should do, which is give him rest."