Inside The Box

• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: May 9, 2008 - Page: 1C - UPDATED: 1 a.m.

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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.