Robert “Red” Berry keeps two 109-year-old chipped green wooden baseball seats from Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, and a turnstile from the defunct Bobby Maduro Miami Stadium inside his home.
In fact, Berry’s apartment is bursting with baseball memorabilia.
Framed signed photos of legends like Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda and University of Miami Hurricanes baseball coach Ron Fraser adorn the walls of his kitchen and living room.
Mementos of Berry’s six-decade career as a South Florida baseball coach—T-shirts, baseball caps, photos, plaques, patches and newspaper articles—trickle down the hallway into his office and bedroom. The walls of the bathroom look like a shrine for his all-time favorite player, Brooklyn Dodgers’ second baseman Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play in modern Major League Baseball.
“How many 85-year-olds do you know wear a bat and ball on their pinky?” said Berry, just a couple weeks before turning 86 at his Kendall home, fondly known as “Baseball Heaven.” He was sporting a UM T-shirt, Hoka sneakers, a Star of David necklace and two chunky rings on his left hand—one commemorating the Hurricanes’ 1985 national title, in which he served as an assistant pitching coach, and another flaunting a giant baseball with a bat encircling his pinky.
Baseball is Berry’s life. It always has been.
Berry pioneered the baseball program at Miami Coral Park Senior High School in 1963. Had three stints as an assistant pitching coach for the Hurricanes. Lead year-round camps at his now-closed Kendall facility, Red Berry’s Baseball World. He is revered in the South Florida community for teaching kids to play for the love of the game.
“He’s a legendary figure,” said long-time friend Mike Rosenthal, a former sportscaster on 790 AM radio who met the baseball savant in the 1980s.
Berry, who was born in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brooklyn, grew up playing Little League baseball at the Boys Club on US 1 and Southwest 32nd Ave. after moving to Florida at 10-years-old.
He enjoyed collecting and trading baseball cards and often fell asleep listening to games on the radio during the summer. When he was 8, he got to watch Jackie Robinson play at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.
As a sophomore at Miami Senior High School, Berry had to “chase balls and keep bats” to earn a uniform on their varsity team, where he eventually played first base and catapulted to the school’s All-Star team.
“I loved the game; it was my identity,” Berry recalled. “I ate, drank and slept baseball.”
Although playing in the Major Leagues wasn’t in the cards, Berry, who played college ball at UM, wanted to coach.
During his high school and college career, he was never taught how to slide properly, he said, and as a kid, he didn’t learn how to throw properly. Coaches at the Boys Club would yell at him to “go overhand,” but wouldn’t take his elbow and show him the technique. Years later, he discovered the problem—throwing with a low elbow.
“I wanted to teach the game the right way,” Berry said. “I wanted to give what I never got.”
But after graduating from UM with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, Berry struggled to find a coaching gig. At the time, football was the moneymaker, so high schools were hiring football coaches who were willing to coach other sports on the side.
In 1962, he landed a job teaching physical education at Royal Palm Elementary in Kendall, but he convinced his former coach at UM, Whitey Campbell, to let him start a freshman team and coach for free in the afternoons. The school paid him in credits toward his master’s degree, which took him eight years to earn.
Opportunity came knocking in 1963, when he was hired to pioneer the baseball program at the Miami Coral Park Senior High School, one of the first schools to have specialized coaches for each sport. He also taught United States history and driver’s education.
But Berry brought textbooks into baseball, too. He wrote a book entitled “The Ram Way,” in honor of the Coral Park Rams, with fundamental techniques that he would lecture and quiz his players on a month before training began. If they didn’t pass with a B average, they didn’t make the team.
The baseball aficionado demanded grit and dedication on every field he coached on, including at Biscayne College, now known as St. Thomas University, Palmetto Senior High School and American Senior High School.
Keith Simmons, who played at Palmetto in 1973 and 1974, remembers Berry ran a tight ship.
“In a two- or three-hour practice, we got one sip of water,” Simmons said. “You’d go to jail today for that, right? But that’s the way it was. If we were losing and you were smiling on the bench, you were going to start running, right then, probably.”
Berry brought that same spirit to the Philadelphia Phillies Minor League team, where he served as general manager during the 1970 season, doing “everything from signing and releasing players to ordering toilet paper,” and to the University of Miami, where he was assistant pitching and hitting coach.
Sometimes, his passion got him into trouble.
While coaching baseball at Biscayne College, Berry clashed over funding with the athletic director, who was also the head basketball coach, leading him to resign midway into his second year. When the principal at American Senior High failed to deliver on his promise to build a baseball field in the back of the school, he confronted him and stopped coaching the team.
“I had a fiery temper,” he recalled.
But when he converted from Judaism to Christianity at 50, that changed.
“Once I got Jesus, I was able to do things that I never could do before,” he said.
One of those things was launching his dream academy, Red Berry’s Baseball World.
What began as a summer baseball camp at Christopher Columbus High School in 1965 morphed by 1988 into a five-acre, $900,000 academy that ran year-round camps for kids between the ages of 4 and 12 in West Kendall’s Horse Country.
It featured two buildings shaped like home plate, a pool shaped like a diamond, a sporting goods store, a concession stand, a dormitory and nine miniature baseball fields with Tifton Bermuda grass and adjustable clay bases. Berry got permission from the widows, sons and grandchildren of baseball legends, including Yankees’ pitcher Babe Ruth and Dodgers’ manager Branch Rickey, to name fields after them.
The academy, which had 14 coaches personally trained by Berry, also had an All-Star travel team known as the Red Dogs and three-month leagues that played wearing replica MLB uniforms.
“It was like a kid went to the big leagues when they played at Red Berry’s,” he recalled. “And you didn’t have to be great.”
Initiatives that recognized effort and character were another hallmark of Baseball World. The “Nasty Boys” program rewarded doggedness and attitude with white T-shirts sporting the program’s name in red and a baseball encircling the letters TYB, which stood for Try Your Best.
Patches were awarded daily for sportsmanship and excellence, and players looked forward to Super Saturdays, an award program that ended every league with medals and the coveted Biggies—trophies that awarded standout students such as the MVP and most improved.
Former Major League baseball coach José “Nachi” Castro said his son Matthew, who is now a firefighter, not only learned how to play the game at Baseball World, but how to treat people.
“My son’s turned out to be a true professional, very respectful, and he treats the human being first…and that was big with Red, respect for others,” Castro said.
Aside from camps, Berry hosted birthday parties and weddings, including his own, at Baseball World. After his second divorce, he lived in a make-shift apartment in the stadium’s catacombs for 10 years.
After he retired in 2012, the facility was sold to Benjamín León Sr. of Leon Medical Center, a healthcare system serving the Medicare community in Miami-Dade County, who handed it to a developer and created 12 estates named after Berry.
But Berry’s ardent fervor for baseball has not waned.
Today, he spends most of his days researching for his weekly newsletter, which has roughly 500 subscribers, and preparing for his monthly Miami Baseball Forum, an organization he founded in 1995 to unite baseball fanatics.
At a recent session, more than 50 members huddled up in a dimly lit reserved space at Duffey’s Sports Bar and Grill in Kendall to welcome former MLB catcher and coach Bobby Ramos. They also inducted the first members of the ASS program—an initiative Berry created to reward attendance, stability and support at the forum.
“The people who come here think baseball is the greatest game in the world, and we love to talk about it,” Rosenthal said.
He opened the November meeting like the coach players know him to be. Armed with a thick yellow notepad filled with scribbles in red and green ink, Berry stood up and blew a whistle.
“I want to welcome everyone to the Miami Baseball Forum,” he said in a firm, bold voice, no mic needed. “We meet for the love of America’s game.”
