Former Ringgold baseball draftee Jesse Cross

Proudly clad in the pinstripes of the Minnesota Twins, Jesse Cross toed the rubber. In the batter’s box stood Jose Canseco, already a drugstore Pow!-boy. To make matters worse for Cross, the bases were loaded with Oakland A’s and only one out beamed from the scoreboard.

True, this was only a spring-training contest. And Cross was a long shot to make the big leagues that March afternoon in 1992, regardless of what happened against Canseco.

But this was also the Ringgold High School legend’s big chance. After two years at Middle Georgia College, after four summers in the minors, Cross was where he’d always dreamed of being, on a major league team, even if it was only the 40-man spring roster.

“I’d even gotten my baseball card photo taken by Topps,” he recalled Tuesday. “They pay you $5. I’ve still got the certificate they give you.”

(A quick check of the Internet, by the way, indicated that a 1991 Topps Canseco card is currently worth 20 cents. Sometimes justice does prevail.)

But we digress. With the same guts and gusto he always displayed during his glory days with Ringgold’s Tigers, Cross threw three pitches. The mighty Canseco went down on strikes.

“That was my highlight,” Cross said. “That’s my best memory of playing pro baseball.”

Alas, he never made it to the majors for a game that counted. Playing basketball a couple of weeks before that ’92 spring training began, he tore up his ankle.

“Pretty bright, huh?” he said, laughing, Tuesday from his office at Alstom Materials Technology Center. “But I still got in eight outings. Six of them went pretty well. I was the last guy cut.”

All of which brings us to Tuesday’s amateur baseball draft. Having originally been drafted in the 30th round by the Boston Red Sox after one year at Middle Georgia, having been drafted again in the 62nd round by Toronto the following spring, the 41-year-old Cross knows something about this event.

So when asked what he thought of what 2006 Ringgold graduate Kyle Heckathorn going to Milwaukee with the 47th pick, Cross said, “My advice would be that if he wants to play major league baseball, he needs to go now. Every year you sit back, you’re getting behind, because you’re not getting any younger.”

Cross could have gotten a 12-month younger start if he had agreed to become the catcher the Red Sox saw for his future.

“But I wanted to prove to everybody that I could be a 5-9 pitcher in the majors,” Cross said. “If I had just done a little homework I could have found out that Boston had no catching prospects in the organization at that time. I could have been sitting in the home dugout at Fenway Park in three years. But you couldn’t Google back then. So I pretty much signed (with Toronto) for a pair of shoes.”

Cross certainly had his moments. The summer after he was released by the Twins after spending his first four years in the Blue Jays organization, he won 14 games for Syracuse in the International League, posting a 2.10 ERA.

And there was that one spring with the Twins.

“They had just won the World Series against the Braves,” Cross recalled. “They were the best team in baseball, but I’ll never forget how I was accepted by guys like Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek. They were just down-to-earth, good people. Just being a part of that for a short time is something I’ll never forget.”

The postscript is that Ringgold and Cross have never forgotten each other. When Catoosa County decided to allow laypeople to work within the school system, Cross became a pitching coach for the Tigers last year.

“He’s one of the most humble people you’ll ever be around, but Jesse’s been a huge addition for us,” Ringgold head coach Brent Tucker said. “We were more aggressive on the mound. We attacked the strike zone more. We challenged the hitters more. Just the trust everybody has in him is irreplaceable.”

Tuesday afternoon found the humble hero of the Tigers’ past on his way to catch son Colton’s summer league baseball practice. Jesse and his childhood sweetheart Luann (formerly Hackett) have seen daughter Jessica become a second-team All-America softball player at Kennesaw State.

“I told Luann just the other day,” he said, “that our life’s worked out pretty well.”

If Topps doesn’t have a card series for guys like Cross, perhaps it should.