A'S get a leg up.(Oakland Athletics, professional baseball team; California)(Brief Article)

Here come the A's, winners of six out of seven games last week while Boston dropped seven in a row. That's a 6 1/2-game flip in the wild-card standings in one short week. Suddenly, Oakland is positioned to be playing in October.

And while the Red Sox keep losing players to injury, the A's are about to get healthier. The last piece of their puzzle is about to limp back to the mound. Literally. In many ways, he's an unlikely benefactor, but he'll help.

This mystery man: a pitcher born with two club feet. A pitcher with an atrophied calf muscle, an offshoot of the club feet. A pitcher whose right leg is an inch shorter than his left leg, giving him a limp in his gait. A pitcher with a bum knee, a knee that was scoped on August 11.

A pitcher whose rehab therapy includes injections of ... rooster comb? Yep. Rooster comb.

Sometime this week, the A's expect to activate Jim Mecir, whose therapy, as Oakland trainer Larry Davis says, is leaving "a lot of roosters running around with no combs"

The injections are of Synvisc, the ...