College baseball legend, Miami Beach native Skip Bertman dies at 88

Sports admin August 14, 2026 0 Comments

College baseball legend, Miami Beach native Skip Bertman dies at 88

Was it only four months ago that I was writing an April tribute for this newspaper on Skip Bertman having his hometown Flamingo Park Baseball field on Miami Beach named for him. It took long enough, but Bertman who died Friday in Baton Rouge from heart failure at the age of 88, lived to see the honor in person.

“How great is this,” Bertman told me in a telephone interview in April. “To go home, listen to all the nice things said about me and eat stone crabs at Joe’s. Not bad, huh?”

Bertman, my friend for more than 75 years, had his share of misfortune (his wife Sandy died several years ago of cancer, as did one of his four daughters). But no one had a more positive outlook on life, accomplished more (five NCAA baseball championships in 18 years at LSU, seven SEC titles, induction into the college baseball Hall of Fame and to me, as significant, coaching his alma mater, Miami Beach High School, to a state baseball championship in Florida in 1970. Bertman was a 1956 graduate, ranking up there with judges, doctors, lawyers and who knows who else.

How did he do all that?

“He could see talent and bring out the best in everyone,” said Richard Berger, a noted cardiologist who 65 years ago was an All-City basketball player at Miami Beach and a close friend of Bertman for nearly 80 years.

What Bertman could also see was “not so much” talent, as in this future journalist who barely missed making Bertman’s Miami Beach Little League All-Star team in 1951, being Bertman’s final cut that miserable summer, only to have the young man who beat me out get sick the day of the big game.

“So where were you?” Bertman asked me after the game. “The movies” was my answer.

“You’ll get other chances,” Bertman responded.

Those other chances included keeping Bertman’s scorebook and covering the Little League and Pony League games for the sadly departed Miami Beach Sun, all while playing a so-so second base.

Those writeups included reporting the name of a 12-year-old centerfielder who dropped a fly ball, costing his team (either Pickin’ Chicken or Hotel Association) a game. Reporting the name of the centerfielder in The Sun so incensed the offending player’s mother, Bertman wondered if such coverage was really necessary? “You know,” Bertman said, “you’re not covering the Yankees-Dodgers World Series here.”

“When we were growing up there was never any jealousy,” Berger told me this week. “All of us grew up in any environment where we rooted for each other. That was how he lived his life. In all the years I’ve known Skip, I never heard anyone say a negative thing about him.”

Stuart Blumberg, who with Berger, pushed for the naming of the stadium for Bertman, said: “The friendships made in the early ‘50’s in Miami Beach, endured throughout our lives. Skip’s ability to teach by listening was his uniqueness of getting the best out of people — not just his players.”

“He was a man who changed college baseball forever,” said Ben McDonald, a star pitcher for LSU and a No. 1 draft choice by the Baltimore Orioles. “As great a coach as Skip was, he was even a better man.”

Bertman also played at the University of Miami from 1958 to 1960 as a catcher and outfielder. He later spent eight seasons on the Hurricanes’ staff under coach Ron Frasser. The Hurricanes reached the postseason each season from 1976 to 1983, made five trips to the College World Series and the first CWS title in 1982.

Following the 1983 season, Bertman left Miami to become the head coach at LSU.

The city of Miami Beach named its baseball stadium at Flamingo Park for Bertman; They did the same thing at LSU, where he coached its baseball team from 1984-2001, before retiring as baseball coach to become athletic director until 2008. The street outside 11,000-seat baseball stadium at LSU is named for Bertman, as is the college baseball “coach of the year” award.

He has written books, been the subject an ESPN documentary “Hold the Rope” and coached the Bronze-winning U.S. National Baseball team in the 1996 Olympics, sending a number of players to the Major Leagues.

But like the hundreds of baseball players he coached and mentored over the years, Skip Bertman was my friend.

George Solomon, a graduate (1958) of Miami Beach High School and the University of Florida (1963), was Sports Editor of The Washington Post (1975-2003), a member of the faculty of U-Maryland College of Journalism (2003-2020) and founding Director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at U-Maryland.