BATON ROUGE — Former LSU baseball head coach and Baton Rouge icon Stanley “Skip” Bertman died at the age of 88 following a brief hospitalization due to heart-related issues, LSU Athletic Director Verge Auberry told WBRZ on Friday.
Bertman is revered as the architect of LSU Tiger baseball for transforming the program from an afterthought in 1983 into a five-time national champion by the time he retired from coaching in 2001.
The Miami native would guide the Tigers to five NCAA College World Series championships (1991, ’93, ’96, ’97, ’00) over his tenure in Baton Rouge and would help establish college baseball as a viable and profitable enterprise throughout the South and especially in the Southeastern Conference.
His legacy far surpasses that of the collegiate game as countless young men in the Baton Rouge area grew up idolizing his Tiger teams and playing out their dreams each summer in Skip’s summer camps. Bertman’s impact in introducing the game to thousands of South Louisiana boys can be credited with the prevalence of travel ball we see today.