Ep. 43 | Tyler LaTorre, Pepperdine University

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Tyler LaTorre, first-year head baseball coach at Pepperdine University, a week before the Waves open their season in Malibu. LaTorre played 10 years of professional baseball as a catcher and won an NAIA national championship in his first season as a head coach, at Westmont in 2023. He inherited a Pepperdine program with a 1992 national championship painted on its outfield wall and a winning culture that had faded.

This is a conversation about the unglamorous middle of a rebuild: the fires that ringed campus in December and January, the cages and clubhouse his staff gutted, what "all things matter" looks like on a Tuesday, the equity a player builds long before he gets into the lineup, and the hour-and-a-half practice plan he would run for an 11U team.

The highlights:

• How a first-year head coach restarts a winning culture at a program that used to be elite
• Why "all things matter" replaced "the little things" in the Pepperdine clubhouse
• The equity a player builds off the field, and how it decides who plays
• Applying pressure instead of absorbing it, plus a redefined version of the double
• Why every Pepperdine practice opens with base running
• A full 90-minute first-practice plan for a 10-and-11-year-old team
• What youth baseball loses when walk, steal, steal, score replaces playing the game
• His own path: a scrappy middle infielder who reached pro ball and the World Baseball Classic

Baseball as a Light After the Fires

The Franklin fire burned through the vegetation around Pepperdine during finals week in December. Finals were canceled, players went home, and no campus buildings, students, or players were harmed. Three weeks later the Palisades fire hit while school was still out, and much of the fuel that would have pushed it north had already burned in December. LaTorre is careful to point out how much worse it was a few miles south of him, and notes that the university turned its parking lots into a staging site for firefighters, first responders, and gas company crews.

He opened his first press conference at Pepperdine with Matthew 5:16 — let your light shine so that others may see your good deeds. That framing carried into the first week back, when classes were online and part of the roster had not returned. He told his players that Utah would not care they were short-handed, so they should make it about their own story instead, and about giving first responders and displaced families somewhere to spend a few hours.

Restarting a Winning Culture

LaTorre grew up on the West Coast wanting to go to Pepperdine, when the program had the same upper-echelon feel as USC, Arizona State, or Stanford. Sitting in the dugout, he can see the ocean over the left field wall and the 1992 national championship on it. Very few programs have that, and he is blunt that the pride behind it had gone away. His goal for year one is not a win total: it is that players feel they have a chance to win every time they walk into the clubhouse, whether they won or lost the day before.

"The culture takes time, but the mindset — that's something that can change instantly, and that's something I see in our players every single day."

An assistant coach made the point another way in a team meeting: on Selection Sunday, the first four teams in and the first four out are separated by hairs. If you are one of the first four out, the ball in the dirt you did not read in February is the run you did not score in the game you did not win.

Cleaning Up the Cages, the Clubhouse, and the Field

The diagnosis started on his interview, walking campus. The facility did not feel like a place built for development: old turf in the cages, L screens with holes covered by medicine balls, ball baskets that had given out. The message it sent to players was that nobody expected them to hit there. The staff replaced the turf and the screens, cleared a moldy refrigerator and a broken ping-pong table out of the clubhouse, added TVs, and built a nutrition room for players coming straight from class to practice.

Coaches and players now work the field themselves, on the theory that if you take care of the field, the field takes care of you. The tell that it is working is mundane: at 10:15 in the morning, with no class until the afternoon, guys are already down in the cage hitting. They are around each other more — talking the program's lingo, watching video in the clubhouse, eating better — and the play on the field has started to follow.

All Things Matter

Ross offers a phrase for what he is hearing: how you do anything is how you do everything. To LaTorre it means walking the walk in public. Come to practice and you will see him rake the lines, pick up trash, throw batting practice, hit fungo, laugh with his players and tell them he loves them. No job is beneath him, and he holds players to the standard they said they wanted — because championship teams are built on championship-level fall practices, sleep, nutrition, and lifting, not on turning it on at the conference tournament.

He is the same person regardless of how the team is playing, and he is open about being a family man first: a wife of 13 years and an eight-year-old daughter who are around the program. He also separates two meanings of value. The Friday starter and the starting shortstop carry more value to the team than the bullpen catcher or the fourth-string infielder. As people, they do not.

"The bullpen catcher, the fourth-string shortstop, the backup catcher — they probably have a little value to the team on the baseball side. But their value to me as a person is equal."

Building Equity Before You Build a Lineup

Every player who takes the field for Pepperdine is supposed to know he is in a position to succeed, and LaTorre treats that as his own responsibility. Put a pitcher out there who stays up half the night and his teammates will not believe in him even on a good night. Start a hitter as the designated hitter against a pitcher who throws 70% breaking balls when he cannot yet handle a breaking ball, and the four strikeouts are on the coach, not the player. He would rather put the program ahead of any individual and sleep well knowing the right guys were out there.

So equity is built in daily, unspectacular ways: being a good teammate, putting the name on the front of the jersey first, and refusing the distractions — social media, why-aren't-you-playing conversations, misery looking for company. He says his best players squash it quickly when a teammate starts sulking after being corrected. Ten years in pro ball, much of it as a backup catcher, trained him to watch everything except the ball: the base runner, the catcher backing up the throw, the pitcher covering first, the shortstop and second baseman working a double cut. Players figure out fast that he is watching all of it, mostly to catch them doing it right.

"There's no extra work. Going down to the cage and saying, 'I'm going to get extra swings' — that doesn't exist. Those are the swings it takes to be good. There's no extra ground balls; those are the ground balls you need to be good."

Two Types of Pressure

LaTorre wears a hat that says pressure, and he uses it as a teaching tool. Preseason rankings, media days, and hype videos put weight on college players that he never carried, and he could feel it on his own team as opening weekend got close.

"There's two types of pressure: you can either apply pressure, or have pressure applied to you. If you apply pressure, there shouldn't be any pressure on you."

Applying it has a specific look. On the mound it is attacking the strike zone and being quick to the plate so nobody runs. On defense it is being elite at the routine play, throwing to the right base, hitting the cutoff man. On offense it is leading the country in doubles as he defines a double — not a ball off the wall, but a hit by pitch plus a read on a ball in the dirt, or first to third on a blooper because the right fielder is playing deep, or a drag bunt and a stolen base. He also gave his position players a reframe: chase your teammates' numbers instead of your own. Drive in the most runs for the guys hitting around you, make the most assists for your pitchers, try to get the Friday starter to 15 wins and the closer to 10 saves, and your own line will take care of itself.

Bringing the Buzz Back to Campus

Baseball players used to be big men on campus at Pepperdine, and the stadium used to host regionals. LaTorre wants that back and is realistic about what it takes. Games at 1:30 in the afternoon compete with class schedules and Los Angeles traffic, so he is pushing for Friday night baseball with the sun setting over right center field. The rest is on his team: be interesting, win games, and carry yourselves around campus with your shoulders back.

What Youth Baseball Overcomplicates

Asked what elevating the next generation means to him, LaTorre starts with humility. A coach saying "I don't know, but I will do the work to find out" is fine. Making things up on the fly is not. His bigger worry is volume: too many voices pulling young players in too many directions, and parents who could use a pair of common-sense goggles. He did not take a lead until he was 13 in California little league, which meant pitchers only had to throw strikes and runners only had to react to a ball getting past the catcher. There were steps in the process. Now 6U, 7U, and 8U games get decided by a walk, a steal, another steal, and a wild pitch, and the team that makes the fewest mistakes wins.

Development, to him, means building success rather than avoiding mistakes: bat-to-ball skills, throwing strikes, being quick to the plate, fielding a bunt and understanding why the bunt is a good play. It is also a physical argument. A player can grow from 5-foot-8 to 6-foot-2 between nine and 16, and the perfect swing he was drilled into will not survive four inches. He wanted to hit like Ken Griffey Jr., Roberto Alomar, Will Clark, and Robby Thompson, and all he was really trying to do was hit the ball. Co-host Jim Schwanke's shorthand for coaching young players — reps, reps, reps — comes up as the antidote.

An Hour-and-a-Half Practice Plan

Ross has 10- and 11-year-old sons on an 11U team and a practice that night, so he asks for a plan.

For coaches: Do not try to do it all yourself, and do not walk into practice planning to figure it out. Write the week out, know your personnel, and stick to the plan even when the bunt plays are going badly, because the drill that runs 20 minutes long costs you the next thing on the list. Recruit help — a parent who can roll ground balls or keep a station focused counts. Then let your practice plan match what you say matters: if defense is your identity, do not hit for two hours and complain about your defense, and do not spend every day on defense and then complain that you cannot hit.

His 90-minute plan for 11U starts with a 10-minute stretching routine, treated as the window where players lock in for the day. Base running comes next, while their focus is highest, exactly as it does at Pepperdine — same lead at first, same read at second by the number of outs, balls in the dirt, rounding the base.

"Good base runners do not need base coaches. And you don't need to be fast. I was not fast, but I was one of the best base runners you would ever want to play with."

Then catch play with a purpose, tied to whatever the team is working on that day: infielders finishing with relay footwork and a tag, outfielders dropping a ball behind them to field and throw in, catchers in their gear taking short hops and long hops. From there it flows into individual defense — footwork and hand work for infielders, blocking and receiving for catchers, ground balls and pop flies for outfielders — and a few minutes of pop-fly communication. Keep transitions clean, because 90 minutes goes fast. Hitting is last, and it is earned: get three outs, then take your swings.

What the Game Gave Him

LaTorre is candid that nobody watching his high school games would have picked him for Division I baseball, pro ball, or any of it. With a wood bat as a junior he would not have put a ball out of the infield. He was a scrappy middle infielder with a good arm, good instincts, and a competitive streak. UC Davis held a two-day tryout, saw something, and gave him a chance. He moved from shortstop to catcher, helped by hitting left-handed, and the program moved from Division II to Division I during his time there.

His senior year came in a Big West stacked with future big leaguers — Long Beach State ran Troy Tulowitzki, Evan Longoria, and Danny Espinosa out on the same weekend, and Cal State Fullerton had Ricky Romero and Justin Turner. He signed, played a decade, earned dual citizenship in Italy, and played for the Italian national team in the 2013 World Baseball Classic. That is the ledger he is trying to pay forward now, and he will talk Pepperdine baseball with anyone who reaches out.

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 0:43 — The Southern California fires and what Malibu is dealing with
• 3:21 — Being a light for the community a week before opening day
• 5:09 — Omaha, 1992, and a program that fell on hard times
• 7:45 — Culture takes time; mindset can change instantly
• 9:48 — Day one in Malibu: diagnosing the program
• 11:12 — New cages, a cleaned-out clubhouse, and a nutrition room
• 14:07 — How you do anything is how you do everything
• 17:01 — Two kinds of value: on the field and as a person
• 20:03 — Earning the right to play, and the equity behind the lineup
• 23:14 — How a player builds equity, and why there is no extra work
• 28:03 — Two types of pressure
• 31:17 — Bringing the buzz back to campus
• 34:08 — Elevating the next generation without overcomplicating it
• 38:04 — Growth spurts and why bat-to-ball skills come first
• 41:26 — Advice for youth coaches: have a plan and stick to it
• 44:51 — An hour-and-a-half first practice for 11U, from stretching to earning the bats
• 49:57 — Why he loves the game
• 52:07 — Dual citizenship and the 2013 World Baseball Classic with Italy
• 53:30 — Closing thoughts: a dream job and an open invitation

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Tyler LaTorre is the head baseball coach at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a former professional catcher who played for Italy in the 2013 World Baseball Classic. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.