College baseball legend Bertman coming home to special honor
It took decades for the city of Miami Beach to dedicate its Flamingo Park Baseball Stadium the “Stanley Skip Bertman Field” on Thursday.
But who’s counting?
Bertman, who turns 88 on May 23, has on his resume before this latest honor, prime spots in the College Baseball Hall of Fame, Louisiana State University Hall of Fame, state of Louisiana Hall of Fame, University of Miami Hall of Fame and Miami Beach High School Hall of Fame. He has also been named College Baseball Coach of the Year five times, had a street named for him and statue erected in his honor outside LSU’s Alex Box Stadium, Skip Bertman Field, in Baton Rouge.
His record as head baseball coach of LSU of 870-330-3 is likely never to be matched, including his winning the college World Series five times.
Was it 1950 that I first came face-to-face with Berman as a second baseman for one of his Miami Beach Little League teams? Berman’s boss at the time, the late Max Sapper, had a pet chicken, named, “chickie.” My lifelong fear of birds, including “Chickie,” began that spring when attacked by a mockingbird outside our rental house near Flamingo Park.
“George, stop thinking Chickie is a bird of prey, or Skip will bench you,” a friend admonished. Bertman did not bench me. I managed to work through my fear of Chickie to make to the final cut of Bertman’s “All-Star” team that would cross MacArthur Causeway to play a team from Miami. Unfortunately, I was that final cut. Fighting back tears, I went to the Lincoln Theatre the day of the game to see “High Noon.” Meanwhile, the kid Berman chose over me came up sick that day, but Bertman couldn’t find me to promote me.
“I was in the movies,” I told Bertman.
“Too bad,” Bertman consoled. “You’ll have other chances.”
The next year, I moved up to Pony League where I not only played infield, Bertman made me the official scorekeeper. I also covered the games for the now defunct Miami Beach Sun. If there was a choice between playing infield for Bertman or meeting deadlines for the Sun, Bertman always sided with the Sun. So did my father.
“That’s your future,” Bertman told me.
Bertman’s judgment of me as a 13-year-old was typical of a maturity well beyond of his years and served him well his entire life. Graduating from Miami Beach High School in 1956, Bertman went to the University of Miami where he became a valued catcher and clutch hitter from 1958 to 1960.
After graduating from Miami, he went to work at Miami Beach High School where for 11 years he was on the faculty and coached the baseball team. In 1970, after being runners-up in the state tournament twice, Miami Beach won the state championship. In 1976, Miami Hurricanes Baseball coach Ron Fraser hired Bertman to be the associate head coach — a position he held until hired by LSU in 1984 to be its head coach.
For the next 17 years, Bertman set the standard for coaching in college baseball. His LSU teams won five national championships, made 11 appearances in the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, and sent numerous players into professional baseball, including Ben McDonald, the top pick in the 1989 amateur draft.
In 1995, Bertman was named head coach of the U.S. national team, a position that carried over to the 1996 Olympic team that won a bronze medal in the Atlanta Games. That baseball did not get the prominence as other Olympic sports, which prompted a somewhat cranky Berman to ask, “where are all your media friends?” You always knew where you stood with Skip. A number of Bertman’s players from his National team made the major leagues and two, A.J. Hinch (Detroit) and Mark Kotsay (Athletics) are managing in the major leagues.
In the magazine Inside Pitch, Bertman told Adam Revelette: “I wanted to be a baseball coach when I was 13. When I was 14, I started to coach. I liked the teaching that came with coaching.
“I did have to make an effort to be patient, to be mature. I really hadn’t any of these things before I worked with Ron Fraser at Miami.”
Personally, how kind was he to host two of my three sons at LSU’s baseball camp in the 1980’s and tell me gently “they were good, but would never play in the major leagues.” “Skip knew how to push the right buttons,” McDonald said in an interview several years ago. “He’d sometimes bring you down, but knew how to bring you back up.”
There have been four books written about Bertman, who also wrote three himself, plus the 2021 ESPN documentary about Berman and his LSU program, “Hold the Rope.”
“Skip Bertman was much more than a baseball coach; he really was the impresario of college baseball,” said Marc Kinderman, the producer of the documentary. In the documentary, we learned Bertman’s most memorable game at LSU was the 1996 title game walk-off home run by Warren Morris against Miami, called “the shot heard ‘round the Bayou.” And in Joe Posnanski’s 2025 book “Why We Love Baseball,” Bertman’s 1982 “grand illusion” play (while coaching for Miami) against Wichita, was described in detail.
One of Bertman’s closest boyhood friends, Dr. Richard Berger, an All-City basketball player at Miami Beach and later a respected cardiologist, said “From Day 1, Skip always wanted to be coach. Max Sapper was Skip’s major influence. They both could spot talent and put together teams that were evenly matched all season. He was a one-in-million guy. If he believed in you, that’s all you needed. The college baseball coach of the year award is named for Skip Berman, what else do you need to say?”
After retiring from coaching in 2000, LSU made Bertman its athletic director, a valued position he held until 2008. He is now athletic director emeritus at the university and still attends all the home baseball games. Last year, Skip’s wife, Sandy, passed away after a four-year struggle with pancreatic cancer. A daughter, Dr. Jo Bertman, died in 2012. He remains close to his three other daughters. He sometimes is confined to a wheelchair, but says he’s doing fine.
“You have to be patient to coach,” Bertman said, “I won’t give up on anybody, even if it takes four, five years.”
Of his latest honor, from the city of Miami Beach, Bertman told me: “It’s special. What could be bad? Flying home to where I grew up, having nice things said about me and eating stone crabs at Joe’s.”
George Solomon was a 1958 graduate of Miami Beach High School, Sports Editor of The Washington Post from 1975 to 2003 and a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and founding director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland.
This story was originally published April 19, 2026 at 8:00 AM.
