Remembering Verner Ross‘s unheralded field of dreams.
John Kittredge recalls that time he was eight years old when he first came face to face with Verner Ross. As he did so many summer evenings, young John would bicycle the two miles from his home on McIver Street to Meadowbrook Park to catch a baseball game. Maybe grab a ball, even. But back in the 1960s, baseballs in the minor leagues weren’t a dime-a-dozen. You could keep one that sailed into the stands, but God forbid you snatch a foul ball from the field.
In the era of the Greenville Mets, that god was Verner Ross.
“One day, a ball rolled up right in front of me, and I reached out and grabbed it, and some attendant came and got me and said that Mr. Ross wanted to see me. Well, I almost started crying on the spot because I knew I violated the rules,” says Kittredge, now a state Supreme Court justice.
From 1965 to 1972, Ross owned Western Carolinas League teams, with affiliates including the Mets, Red Sox, and Rangers. He also owned Ross Tire and Battery on Westfield Street, roughly a half-mile from what used to be Meadowbrook Park, now Unity Park. A big man, he towered over every game, watching from the railing of his air-conditioned office, where he’d stash three pennies above the doorsill for good luck.
Kittredge snagged a bit of good luck—and Ross’s trademark largesse—when he tearfully surrendered the ill-gotten ball.
“He told me to go back to my seat: ‘Don’t do it again.’ I used to go to almost every game I could. And the next night, an attendant said, ‘Mr. Ross wants to see you.’ And I thought, ‘What in the world have I done now?’ And I went back up there, and he had a brand new ball, and he says, ‘You’re a good baseball fan, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, sir, I love baseball,’ and he said, ‘Well, here, I want you to have this brand-new ball. And I want you to watch the game with me tonight,’ and I did.”
To Verner Ross, baseball was as much a family as were his wife and four children.
Mike Chibbaro wrote the actual book on Greenville’s Great American pastime, Voices from Meadowbrook Park, published this year; chapter 15 is titled simply, “Verner.” Over lunch at Northgate Soda Shop, the iconic lunch counter on North Main Street, which opened in 1947 when the Greenville Spinners played here, he sat with Doug Ross, Verner’s youngest.
“Those twenty-five guys that your dad had on the payroll, they were all family. I mean, he cared for them as if they were family,” Chibbaro says to Doug Ross. “And I joke he never pitched baseball with me out in the yard, but he bought me a baseball team,” Ross says of his father, whose clubs turned out thirty-seven players who made it to the Big Leagues.
Among those was Nolan Ryan, who played a single season in Greenville with Ross’s farm club before entering the Baseball Hall of Fame thirty-three years later. “In 1966, I was Nolan Ryan’s batboy here,” Doug Ross recalls. “He was just a skinny ol’ kid from Texas. On the rare nights off, we’d go play putt-putt together.”
While the right-hander sounds almost as if he were an older brother to the Ross kids, Kittredge remembers what Ryan brought to the diamond and to Greenville. “There were certain players that came through that you could just tell were different,” Kittredge says, “When he would throw the ball, it made a different sound.”
And the crack of the bat you hear in Greenville today is largely thanks to Verner Ross, according to the younger Ross, Chibbaro, and Kittredge. “Having baseball in Greenville, we wouldn’t be where we are today without Verner Ross,” the judge says. “I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
It was, after all, Ross who welcomed some of baseball’s most enduring names to Meadowbrook Park: Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, and many more during regular Major League exhibition games there.
Ross’s hometown stand ended in 1972 shortly after 3 a.m. on Valentine’s Day. Someone had set the stadium on fire. The park, already a routine victim of Reedy River floods, burned to the ground. The Mets were out, but Ross had an obligation from the Texas Rangers farm team to play one last season.
Surely, the owner didn’t stay in the game for money.
“It took an entrepreneur like Verner Ross to finance it because you’re not getting anything from the big leagues, maybe uniforms, but other than that, the financial aspect of it was all on his shoulders,” Chibbaro says. “I think he loved baseball so much he didn’t want to see baseball die.”
Verner Ross passed away in 1980, eight years after professional baseball vanished in Greenville and four years before the Greenville Braves started their twenty-year run off Mauldin Road. So if Ross deserves so much credit for pro ball’s place in Greenville, why isn’t his name as big as, say, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson?
To that, Kittredge responds: “I wish I could go back and thank him for his commitment, his passion to the game, and what it really meant—it has a ripple effect through the years to this day.”
It was Ross who welcomed some of baseball’s most enduring names to Meadowbrook Park: Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, and many more during regular Major League exhibition games there.
