Versatility, unselfishness helps A's deal with injuries

	Starting shortstop Bobby Crosby played in only 96 games last season and has yet to play in any major-league exhibition games this spring. AP
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PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Beat-up Mark Kotsay, the A's starting center fielder, won't be starting anywhere for a couple of months. But are the A's worried about it? Nope. Not even close.

Bobby Crosby, the team's fine but lately way-too-fragile shortstop, hasn't even made it into a big-league exhibition game full time yet this spring. Right now, he's no more than a coin-flip choice for starting the season on time.

The A's? They have Crosby's bad back. No sweat.

Is there any team in baseball that adapts quite like the A's? They are the Sultans of Scramble, the Masters of Making Do. We're still two weeks away from the 2007 regular season and Oakland -- the reigning American League West champ, a playoff participant in five of the past seven years, going for a ninth straight winning season -- already is in full improv mode. It's as if the A's plan to wing it. Or at least plan on having to wing it.

If you want to praise Billy Beane, the team's outside-the-box general manager, for the A's ability to adapt, that's probably a good place to start. He has built a team of moveable and manageable parts, a roster stacked with versatile and largely selfless players. That's helped a lot these past couple of years and, already, it looks like it will be coming in handy again this one.

"However Billy does it ... you got me. I don't know if he plans for people to get hurt. I don't know how he does it," says Crosby, who is taking it slow and steady in his return from a back injury. "I think that's why he's better than anyone else at what he does. He somehow sees the future. He just knows people, knows players and knows that different things happen in the game."

Injuries happen, of course. How teams deal with them doesn't just happen. Kotsay's surgically repaired back will keep him in his La-Z-Boy until at least mid-May, so right fielder Milton Bradley will move over to center (where he's played the majority of his career, anyway), first baseman Nick Swisher will take over in right (Swisher plays almost anywhere) and Dan Johnson, penciled in as the designated hitter on many days, will plug in at first base. If Crosby's ailing back needs more time to heal, the A's have Marco Scutaro, a super utility infielder who has subbed for Crosby before. Scutaro has played 150 games at shortstop for the A's over the past two seasons, and he played 123 games at second when Mark Ellis was injured in 2004.

Scutaro and, especially, Swisher have demonstrated just how important a willing, versatile player can be. Decent infield utility players like Scutaro who can play for long stretches of time are hard to come by. And a guy who can play both first and the outfield like Swisher -- often flipping back and forth in the same week or the same game -- is even harder to find.

"I talk to them all about the team-first type of play," says new manager Bob Geren, who also points out his bendable pitching staff (Joe Kennedy can be anything from a lefty setup man to a starter) and said he's talked to young infielder Antonio Perez about playing outfield. "We don't have selfish players in this organization."