BATON ROUGE -- Louisiana native and former LSU baseball great Chad Ogea has been inducted into the Kinston (N.C.) Professional Baseball Hall of Fame.

The product of Lake Charles, La. played at LSU from 1989-91, and he was the winning pitcher in the 1991 College World Series championship game. Ogea, selected in the third round of the 1991 MLB draft by the Cleveland Indians, spent part of the 1992 season with the Kinston Indians, Cleveland’s Class A affiliate.

Ogea posted a 13-3 record and a 3.49 ERA in Kinston, and two years later, he was in the major leagues for the first of six seasons. He won two games for Cleveland in the 1997 World Series against the Florida Marlins.

Ogea, 37, now works in partnership with some fellow former LSU athletes, owning and operating The Big Leagues of Baton Rouge, a 20,000-square-foot baseball instruction facility with about 300 members.

Teaching baseball, Ogea said, is only part of his job. The staff keeps track of students’ grades and helps to make sure everything is right in their home life.

“That’s become more of our business than just baseball,” Ogea said. “That’s why we do it.”

Ogea also helps run Baton Rouge’s 70-team American Legion baseball program, which had about 1,000 players in it last year.

Ogea, a family man with a wife and two young daughters, went back to school at LSU in the summer of 2001 after he retired from pro baseball. He earned a degree in landscape architecture, which he used extensively for about a year before starting his career in baseball instruction.

Ogea said working with youngsters and watching them develop is a very rewarding profession.

“Over time, you see their confidence level rise and you see the kid get better, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Wow, it’s a whole different person than the one that first walked in,’ ” Ogea said. “I think that’s the biggest enjoyment I get out of it, is the fact that we’re helping the kids in not only baseball, but in other things, too.”