Is it common to wire a Crack like this ? It sounds like a good and easy alternative.
It's a pretty uncommon modification as far as I can tell.
If Speedball also moves the operating points up, closer to HA-2, then Crack with Speedball wired for 6CG7, becomes like a HA-2 with solid rectifiers with a simpler and/or better bias scheme.
The HA-2 runs a lot of extra voltage to help increase the value of the cathode bias resistor on the 6080 to get it well above the impedance of the headphones one would be expected to use while still running lots of quiescent current. This resistor is in parallel with the headphones themselves and signal current in the output stage is shared between these parts, so the higher the value of this resistor, the more current is available for the headphone load. The larger half of the Speedball presents a very high AC impedance, so nearly all of the available signal current will be delivered from the headphone, and the drastically higher operating voltage isn't required.