Inside The Box
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Players, coaches share memories of Alex Box Stadium
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Pat Moock doesn’t think anyone saw him Thursday when he bent down on the Alex Box pitcher’s mound and scooped up a handful of dirt and poured it into a baby-food jar.
“I did the same thing behind third base for Wally and went into left field and grabbed a hunk of grass for Randall,” Moock confided.
The Wally is Wally McMakin. The Randall is Randall Aldridge. The tie binding the three is LSU baseball and Alex Box Stadium.
It’s a bond that holds nearly as tight today as it did 33 years ago, “…when we were truly a team, ’cause somebody always picked up somebody else,” Aldridge said.
The three were members of LSU’s 1975 SEC baseball champions. Moock, a right-hander, posted a 10-0 record and shared a spot on the All-Southeastern Conference team with third baseman McMakin. Aldridge was the team captain.
Alex Box Stadium is a thread that runs through generations of LSU players and none more than Moock and his family.
His dad, Joe Sr., played on the same team as Alex Box, the handsome-but-injured football player who turned his athletic talents to the baseball field in the early 1940s. Joe Moock Sr. died in 2007 and took with him dozens of LSU baseball stories.
Like most of his teammates, the elder Moock was in uniform when the field and grandstand were named for his friend and teammate. At Alex Box Stadium 20 years ago, Joe Moock Sr., said Box “was a guy everyone called “Alec” though his name was Alex and wasn’t an abbreviation for Alexander like lots of people thought. He was very popular and lots of girls came out to the park to watch him. He was a good guy, a good teammate.”
What Joe Moock Sr. couldn’t have known in 1942, Box’s senior season, or in 1943 after Box was killed in North Africa during World War II, was his family name would be a thread running through the LSU baseball tapestry, starting near the 1938 opening of LSU’s on-campus stadium to its first national championship 53 years later.
Moock’s oldest son, Joe Jr., was the first LSU player taken in the Major League Baseball draft.
His second son, Mike, played on LSU teams making the transition from 20-game seasons to a more modern 40-plus game season in the early 1970s.
Pat Moock, the youngest, held school pitching records on a record-setting team and was the winning pitcher in LSU’s first NCAA tournament victory.
And, Joe Moock’s grandsons, Chris and Greg, played on the national championship teams of the 1990s.
In fact, Chris Moock, a third baseman, made the throw to get the final out in LSU’s first national championship, a 6-3 win over Wichita State.
For him, his family and, he said hundreds of his LSU baseball-playing brothers, today marks the beginning of a sad weekend, the final regular-season games in the 70-year-old Alex Box Stadium.
“I hope LSU forgives me for taking the dirt, but I had to have it,” Pat Moock said. “I can’t believe they’re tearing it down. That’s hallowed ground for anybody who played out there.
“I remember the first time, the first day playing a game at Alex Box. I was a freshman and Louis Farmer was supposed to start the second game of a doubleheader against Rice.
“Coach (Jim) Smith came to me the day before and told me Lou was having arm problems and if he couldn’t go, then ‘you’re the starting pitcher,’ He told me to go to class and come to the park and see if he needed me.
“Well, I got to the park after Randy Wiles pitched a no-hitter to open the season, and Lou was warming up and came back to the dugout shaking his arm, and there was a discussion and he pointed down the bench in my direction and yelled, ‘Birch, warm up,” talking to Dale Birch. I still pitched that day and remember so vividly when coach called me from the bullpen.
“I stepped onto the rubber and I could hear people stepping on peanut shells in the stands. I could hear people whispering. The concrete in the grandstand magnified the sounds,” Pat Moock said. “What a cool feeling and it thrills me to this day to remember it.”
That was 1972 and Alex Box was taking on its own Field of Dreams’ “thick” memories.
In 1975, with McMakin and Aldridge, the whispers became cheers, the scene setter that would leave McMakin and others thirsting for much more.
“Like so many others, I was in Alex Box Stadium in a period in my life that no young man can ever forget,” Aldridge said this week. “I never went to the stadium until I played there and the first game I saw — I was on the bench — was when Randy threw that no-hitter.”
Aldridge said that game imbedded a lasting love in his soul for the stadium.
“I remember going under the grandstand and reading that plaque about Alex Box, and remember how much that meant to me. My dad was a veteran and my brother, Mackie, just got back from Vietnam,” he said. “And, back then, we knew everybody in the stands.”
That is until 1975, when LSU became the first SEC team to have a 40-win season in their record-setting 19-3 march through the SEC.
That’s when some 3,800 packed into the grandstand and temporary bleachers for the SEC championship game — the first of the best-of-three series — against Georgia.
LSU was down 5-0 early, rallied to tie, then won 6-5 in extra innings.
To this day, McMakin, then a junior, said the night convinced him that his team, his school could be a baseball power, that Alex Box could become one of a handful of the country’s legendary college baseball parks.
Several years later, in 1983, LSU was looking for a coach.
Miami assistant Skip Bertman was the man. McMakin was among a handful of men organizing LSU’s first Coaches Committee to help fulfill the dream of taking the Tigers to the mountaintop — of turning Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, the site of the College World Series, into Alex Box Stadium-North, or turning Alex Box Stadium into Rosenblatt Stadium-South.
Tommy Virgets, LSU’s first four-sport baseball letterman (1952-55), was in that group.
“I played in that stadium when we had no fences, only stands of cane that lined the outfield fence. To hit one out, you had to hit one out on Nicholson Drive. There were lots of inside-the-park home runs,” Virgets said. “That’s what I remember, and I remember Roger Sigler, one of the best players I ever saw, hit a home run right handed and hit one left handed in the same game.”
That was a feat equaled by Mike Miley some 20 years later.
“If you talk to any former player, you’re going to get the same. Lots of us remember when there were 50 people in the stands, sometimes 200 and the occasional weekend series when there were a thousand. And, then we helped get the ball rolling, helped get LSU baseball to a point where it needed to be,” Virgets said.
“Alex Box Stadium means a lot to me — this place, this ground, this field and I don’t think anyone can rebuild what they have here. When it’s torn down, it will be gone, and I’ll miss it deeply,” Virgets said.
That wasn’t lost on Bertman when he took his first time out to The Box in the fall of 1983.
Several years later, a lanky left-handed pitcher John O’Donoghue signed with LSU out of Elkton, Md.
“Coach Bertman continued to tell us that we would be the best (program) in the country, and when I came in and looked at Alex Box, well it was the best ballpark I’d ever played in,” O’Donoghue said. “I never heard of it before I came here, but I thought it was awesome.
“But, before we were ever issued gear, we had to put in mandatory working hours on the field. We painted and we cleaned the stadium and we fixed the field ’cause coach Bertman said that we were going to have pride in this field because we helped build it,” he said. “And we did. We have pride in it.”
After his minor-league days, O’Donoghue returned to Baton Rouge. He’s a member of the Police Department’s special weapons and tactics unit and said Alex Box was part of the reason he came back.
“I love it here. Baton Rouge is the best place to raise a family. I love the people,” he said.
Yet, to a man, the players, the folks who made Alex Box Stadium what it is today, wondered if the move to a new Alex Box Stadium is necessary.
“I know it would be a good thing to take the high road and say that it’s time to move on,” Pat Moock said. “But, I’m one of the old-time guys who believes that you can’t move Alex Box Stadium. I know the new stadium will be nice, but it won’t be Alex Box.
“One of the problems for us is that when we pass the new stadium, we can’t look at our children and grandchildren and tell them that we played there.”
“I did the same thing behind third base for Wally and went into left field and grabbed a hunk of grass for Randall,” Moock confided.
The Wally is Wally McMakin. The Randall is Randall Aldridge. The tie binding the three is LSU baseball and Alex Box Stadium.
It’s a bond that holds nearly as tight today as it did 33 years ago, “…when we were truly a team, ’cause somebody always picked up somebody else,” Aldridge said.
The three were members of LSU’s 1975 SEC baseball champions. Moock, a right-hander, posted a 10-0 record and shared a spot on the All-Southeastern Conference team with third baseman McMakin. Aldridge was the team captain.
Alex Box Stadium is a thread that runs through generations of LSU players and none more than Moock and his family.
His dad, Joe Sr., played on the same team as Alex Box, the handsome-but-injured football player who turned his athletic talents to the baseball field in the early 1940s. Joe Moock Sr. died in 2007 and took with him dozens of LSU baseball stories.
Like most of his teammates, the elder Moock was in uniform when the field and grandstand were named for his friend and teammate. At Alex Box Stadium 20 years ago, Joe Moock Sr., said Box “was a guy everyone called “Alec” though his name was Alex and wasn’t an abbreviation for Alexander like lots of people thought. He was very popular and lots of girls came out to the park to watch him. He was a good guy, a good teammate.”
What Joe Moock Sr. couldn’t have known in 1942, Box’s senior season, or in 1943 after Box was killed in North Africa during World War II, was his family name would be a thread running through the LSU baseball tapestry, starting near the 1938 opening of LSU’s on-campus stadium to its first national championship 53 years later.
Moock’s oldest son, Joe Jr., was the first LSU player taken in the Major League Baseball draft.
His second son, Mike, played on LSU teams making the transition from 20-game seasons to a more modern 40-plus game season in the early 1970s.
Pat Moock, the youngest, held school pitching records on a record-setting team and was the winning pitcher in LSU’s first NCAA tournament victory.
And, Joe Moock’s grandsons, Chris and Greg, played on the national championship teams of the 1990s.
In fact, Chris Moock, a third baseman, made the throw to get the final out in LSU’s first national championship, a 6-3 win over Wichita State.
For him, his family and, he said hundreds of his LSU baseball-playing brothers, today marks the beginning of a sad weekend, the final regular-season games in the 70-year-old Alex Box Stadium.
“I hope LSU forgives me for taking the dirt, but I had to have it,” Pat Moock said. “I can’t believe they’re tearing it down. That’s hallowed ground for anybody who played out there.
“I remember the first time, the first day playing a game at Alex Box. I was a freshman and Louis Farmer was supposed to start the second game of a doubleheader against Rice.
“Coach (Jim) Smith came to me the day before and told me Lou was having arm problems and if he couldn’t go, then ‘you’re the starting pitcher,’ He told me to go to class and come to the park and see if he needed me.
“Well, I got to the park after Randy Wiles pitched a no-hitter to open the season, and Lou was warming up and came back to the dugout shaking his arm, and there was a discussion and he pointed down the bench in my direction and yelled, ‘Birch, warm up,” talking to Dale Birch. I still pitched that day and remember so vividly when coach called me from the bullpen.
“I stepped onto the rubber and I could hear people stepping on peanut shells in the stands. I could hear people whispering. The concrete in the grandstand magnified the sounds,” Pat Moock said. “What a cool feeling and it thrills me to this day to remember it.”
That was 1972 and Alex Box was taking on its own Field of Dreams’ “thick” memories.
In 1975, with McMakin and Aldridge, the whispers became cheers, the scene setter that would leave McMakin and others thirsting for much more.
“Like so many others, I was in Alex Box Stadium in a period in my life that no young man can ever forget,” Aldridge said this week. “I never went to the stadium until I played there and the first game I saw — I was on the bench — was when Randy threw that no-hitter.”
Aldridge said that game imbedded a lasting love in his soul for the stadium.
“I remember going under the grandstand and reading that plaque about Alex Box, and remember how much that meant to me. My dad was a veteran and my brother, Mackie, just got back from Vietnam,” he said. “And, back then, we knew everybody in the stands.”
That is until 1975, when LSU became the first SEC team to have a 40-win season in their record-setting 19-3 march through the SEC.
That’s when some 3,800 packed into the grandstand and temporary bleachers for the SEC championship game — the first of the best-of-three series — against Georgia.
LSU was down 5-0 early, rallied to tie, then won 6-5 in extra innings.
To this day, McMakin, then a junior, said the night convinced him that his team, his school could be a baseball power, that Alex Box could become one of a handful of the country’s legendary college baseball parks.
Several years later, in 1983, LSU was looking for a coach.
Miami assistant Skip Bertman was the man. McMakin was among a handful of men organizing LSU’s first Coaches Committee to help fulfill the dream of taking the Tigers to the mountaintop — of turning Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, the site of the College World Series, into Alex Box Stadium-North, or turning Alex Box Stadium into Rosenblatt Stadium-South.
Tommy Virgets, LSU’s first four-sport baseball letterman (1952-55), was in that group.
“I played in that stadium when we had no fences, only stands of cane that lined the outfield fence. To hit one out, you had to hit one out on Nicholson Drive. There were lots of inside-the-park home runs,” Virgets said. “That’s what I remember, and I remember Roger Sigler, one of the best players I ever saw, hit a home run right handed and hit one left handed in the same game.”
That was a feat equaled by Mike Miley some 20 years later.
“If you talk to any former player, you’re going to get the same. Lots of us remember when there were 50 people in the stands, sometimes 200 and the occasional weekend series when there were a thousand. And, then we helped get the ball rolling, helped get LSU baseball to a point where it needed to be,” Virgets said.
“Alex Box Stadium means a lot to me — this place, this ground, this field and I don’t think anyone can rebuild what they have here. When it’s torn down, it will be gone, and I’ll miss it deeply,” Virgets said.
That wasn’t lost on Bertman when he took his first time out to The Box in the fall of 1983.
Several years later, a lanky left-handed pitcher John O’Donoghue signed with LSU out of Elkton, Md.
“Coach Bertman continued to tell us that we would be the best (program) in the country, and when I came in and looked at Alex Box, well it was the best ballpark I’d ever played in,” O’Donoghue said. “I never heard of it before I came here, but I thought it was awesome.
“But, before we were ever issued gear, we had to put in mandatory working hours on the field. We painted and we cleaned the stadium and we fixed the field ’cause coach Bertman said that we were going to have pride in this field because we helped build it,” he said. “And we did. We have pride in it.”
After his minor-league days, O’Donoghue returned to Baton Rouge. He’s a member of the Police Department’s special weapons and tactics unit and said Alex Box was part of the reason he came back.
“I love it here. Baton Rouge is the best place to raise a family. I love the people,” he said.
Yet, to a man, the players, the folks who made Alex Box Stadium what it is today, wondered if the move to a new Alex Box Stadium is necessary.
“I know it would be a good thing to take the high road and say that it’s time to move on,” Pat Moock said. “But, I’m one of the old-time guys who believes that you can’t move Alex Box Stadium. I know the new stadium will be nice, but it won’t be Alex Box.
“One of the problems for us is that when we pass the new stadium, we can’t look at our children and grandchildren and tell them that we played there.”
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