I grew up a Mississippi State baseball fan, which means I grew up knowing exactly who Skip Bertman was.
I didn’t need to know how many national championships he had won or how many times he had taken LSU to Omaha. I just knew LSU was coming to town, I hated them and beating them mattered. That’s probably as good of an explanation of Skip Bertman’s impact as any.
By the time I was old enough to care about baseball, Bertman had already built LSU into a monster. He arrived in Baton Rouge in 1984, took the Tigers to Omaha 11 times and won five national championships. I grew up in the SEC baseball world he and Ron Polk had already helped create.
Polk built something in Starkville that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mississippi was a football state in a football conference, and somehow thousands of people decided spending an entire spring weekend sitting in the outfield watching college baseball was the most important thing they could possibly be doing.
Bertman saw what was happening at Mississippi State and believed LSU could have it, too. And he was right.
Former LSU Head Coach Paul Mainieri once told me he remembered playing at LSU in the 1970s when SEC baseball was largely an afterthought. Football was king. Baseball was something to do in the spring. Polk changed that at Mississippi State and Bertman changed it at LSU. Then everyone else had to catch up.
Look at the SEC now, the stadiums, the crowds. Look at the amount of money being poured into these programs. And every June, watch what happens when LSU makes it to Omaha. Half the state of Louisiana seems to pick up and move to Nebraska for two weeks.
That’s part of what Skip Bertman built.
He didn’t just convince LSU fans to care about baseball. He convinced them that going to Omaha was something LSU did. He made the College World Series a destination for an entire fan base and turned an annual trip to Nebraska into something that feels almost like a Louisiana tradition.
That doesn’t happen because of one person, obviously. But you can’t tell the story of how SEC baseball became what it is today without Skip Bertman. And I can’t really tell the story of why baseball became so important to me without talking about the world Bertman and Polk helped create.
Baseball wasn’t just another Mississippi State sport. It was what we did. You spent spring weekends at The Dude. You knew the players, the history and you absolutely knew when LSU was coming to town.
One of my favorite stories from that rivalry came from former LSU pitcher Doug Thompson’s recruitment.
Polk called Thompson and told him he was the missing piece Mississippi State needed to win a national championship. Bertman’s pitch was slightly different.
“We’re going with or without you.”
Thompson went to LSU. LSU won the national championship. Of course they did.
He built a program that expected to win, and then won so much that eventually everyone else started expecting it, too.
The funny part is that after all the years of competing against each other, Bertman and Polk remained friends. Two guys spent years trying to beat each other, stealing recruits from each other and building two of the best baseball programs in the country. Then, decades later, they could sit around, eat lunch and talk about it.
I’m a Mississippi State graduate who lives in Baton Rouge now, so my perspective on LSU baseball is admittedly a strange one. I grew up on one side of this rivalry. Now I’m raising kids on the other.
I drop my son off at LSU baseball camp and watch him run out onto a field where I watched so many Mississippi State-LSU series play out. A field that, for most of my childhood, existed in my mind exclusively as enemy territory. Now I’m standing there with a water bottle and baseball bag, sending my kid out to play on it.
Meanwhile, my daughter has been a bat girl at a Mississippi State alumni baseball game. I looked into the dugout at one point and she was running around next to Will Clark. As a little girl in Starkville, I watched guys in Mississippi State uniforms who felt like superheroes. I watched them hit balls into the outfield and thought there couldn’t possibly be anything cooler.
Decades later, my daughter was running around a dugout next to one of the greatest players to ever wear one. Baseball has somehow followed me through every version of my life.
From being the little girl in Starkville who knew LSU was coming to town and that beating them mattered, to the Mississippi State graduate who moved to Baton Rouge, to the mom watching her daughter play next to a Mississippi State legend and her son run onto the field at LSU.
And that’s where Skip Bertman’s legacy becomes harder for me to separate from my own relationship with the sport. Because I don’t know what SEC baseball looks like if he never comes to LSU.
Mississippi State was already building something special under Ron Polk. But Bertman gave Polk and Mississippi State a worthy adversary. LSU became another place where baseball wasn’t simply something to do until football season came back around.
Would SEC baseball eventually have become what it is today without him? Maybe. Would I have grown up loving baseball the way I did? Maybe. Would I still have all these memories, the rivalries, the weekends, my daughter with Will Clark, the slightly strange experience of watching my son run onto an LSU baseball field?
I have no idea.
That’s the thing about a legacy. Eventually it becomes bigger than the list of things you accomplished. Bertman made LSU baseball one of the biggest programs in the country. He helped turn SEC baseball into something people plan their springs around and pass down to their kids.
People like me got to inherit that. I inherited it as a little girl in Starkville and my kids are inheriting it in an entirely different way. And somehow, all these years later, baseball is still giving me some of my favorite memories.
I spent my childhood cheering against Skip Bertman’s LSU teams. It turns out I owe him a thank you.
