Outside of Manager Mike Roberts, there’s no member of the 2023 Cotuit Kettleers who has spent more time at Lowell Park than first-year assistant coach Danny Crossen.
Crossen, a Cotuit native, has done it all for the Kettleers. He started as a bat boy as a kid, attended Kettleer Camps growing up, was a bullpen catcher in high school, and is now an assistant coach.
Oh, and his family has hosted a player every summer since the year before he was born.
The memories go way back for him. He remembers rushing the field when the Kettleers won the Cape Cod Baseball League Championship in 2011, taking batting practice on the field, and forming relationships with the countless players along the way.
You could say he was destined for this, but really, he worked for this.
“Danny earned every step of the way,” Roberts said. “What he was, he was ready when he got his opportunity.”
This is perhaps most evident by the college season Crossen just completed in his fifth year at Northeastern.
After biding his time and developing within the program, and navigating the COVID pandemic, Crossen first burst on to the scene in 2021, hitting .336, good for 13th in the Colonial Athletic Association, and had 14 multi-hit games.
Injuries followed in 2022, but in 2023, after a summer baseball title with Martha’s Vineyard of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, Crossen saw years of work come together for one monster year.
In his 2023 season, Crossen posted career highs in average (.350), home runs (10), RBIs (50), slugging (.550), and stolen bases (16). On top of that, he set school records for hits (84), and consecutive games on-base (60).
“To come back this year, have a good summer last year in the NECBL, and then kind of just see all the hard work to come fight back from that… and just being a part of that team, just seeing it all come back together was unbelievable,” Crossen said.
If you look at Crossen’s roster page on the Northeastern website, you’ll read that he has aspirations to enter the front office field after his playing career is finished, and the seed for that plan can also be traced back to summers at Lowell Park.
“That all probably started (when) I was hosting Kyle Wren, who was at Georgia Tech, and his dad was Frank Wren, who at the time was the general manager of the Atlanta Braves,” Crossen said. “I remember we were sitting at dinner with them one night and he kept asking me the score of the Braves game, and that kind of just sparked my interest in potentially being in the front office one day.”
So how did a lifelong Kettleer fan end up on Mike Roberts coaching staff? In Roberts’ eyes it came down to one key factor.
“His work habits,” Roberts said enthusiastically. “When I’m looking for young assistant coaches, I’m not looking for knowledge. I’m looking for great work habits, (and people) who also love sports, or baseball, or sports in general. Danny fit the bill perfectly for what I look for.”
Roberts has seen Crossen grow up over the years, and calls him family. It’s a special relationship, and one Crossen has only appreciated more upon getting to work under Roberts this summer.
“He’s somebody that I’ve known since I was a little kid,” Crossen said. “He helped me work my way back from my hand injury and fix my swing and all that, so he’s meant a whole lot to me, so it’s been awesome. Now to be able to work with him, it’s been unbelievable.”
Roberts was full of praise for his first-year assistant, and he’s not the only one. One of the players on the 2023 Kettleers roster is Northeastern’s Jake Gigliotti who’s had a better view than most of Crossen’s progression. He couldn’t be happier for his teammate.
“There’s really nobody more deserving than Danny in the world in my opinion,” Gigliotti said. “He’s given every hour he could, every last drop of sweat, blood, tears, everything he could. Not even for himself, he does it so he can help the team win, the best he can.”
When asked to describe the type of person Crossen is, he pointed to Crossen driving the gator by himself, dragging the infield dirt after a Kettleers game.
“That’s exactly what Danny is as a baseball player,” Gigliotti said pointing at Crossen from the bleachers on the third baseline. “He’s just a gamer. He loves being around the game.”
A fun fact about Northeastern baseball is that they don’t name captains. “Horizontal accountability,” was the term used by Gigliotti, but within that he said what’s understood doesn’t need to be explained.
“Danny was definitely our captain. Everybody knew it, and it didn’t have to get named that he was our captain, (but) we kind of just knew he was our captain.” Gigliotti said.
Make no mistake, none of this has come easy for Crossen. Years of hard work have led to all of his success, and whether it’s his teammates, or Roberts who’s known him since he was a kid, people recognize how far he’s come.
For him, he hasn’t lost sight of the kid that first stepped onto the grass at Lowell park, the kid that chopped it up with college baseball’s brightest stars in his living room, and the kid that got to celebrate the 2011 Championship. Now, he’s wearing the Kettleers uniform for the first time.
“It means everything, it’s always been a childhood dream to come out on this field wearing the uniform, being a part of the team and trying to win a championship for Cotuit,” Crossen said. “It really means a lot.”
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cotuit Kettleers assistant coach Danny Crossen is a dream come true