It Might Time For Some Crosby Love

He seemed like he might be able to describe himself as “Crosby, Skills & Mash” — and he was even young. Now he plays a dual role as an A’s coach, serving as infield coach and 3B coach. The first one, infield coach, is a largely invisible role.

You work with players who struggle with their hands, or speed, or throwing, and much of the time as a coach you are limited by the inherent skill sets the player brings. You can’t magically make someone faster or more consistent with their arm angle, though you try every trick to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses. Sometimes the work shows up in the metrics and sometimes players just struggle to improve.

Crosby’s work is vindicated in his success helping Jacob Wilson improve from “bottom of the league” in key SS metrics to actually one of the top 2 in OAA and runs prevented so far in 2026. Wilson’s upward defensive trajectory, and Crosby’s influence, is highlighted in Martin Gallego’s piece this morning . Where it’s hard to earn praise is as a third base coach.

Like an umpire, a third base coach can get it right 9 time out of 10 and the 10th one is what fans will notice and remember. Just like fans of every team believe their manager to be uniquely terrible at making pitching decisions — even though the outcomes often reflect the pitchers more than the skippers — fans of every team complain how their third base coach makes mind-numbingly poor decisions on sending or not sending runners — “I mean just look at that play on June 11th as one of many”…well one…examples. Little has been said on AN about Crosby’s decisions around “send” and “don’t send”.