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Paul Mainieri is baseball through and through.

His best friend is the general manager of the Chicago Cubs. His favorite baseball movie is the 1942 Gary Cooper epic about Lou Gehrig, Pride of the Yankees.

“It seemed like it came on every Saturday afternoon,” Mainieri says, “I would watch it and fell in love with the game because of Lou Gehrig. But Field of Dreams is my second favorite. When Kevin Costner says, ‘Dad, you want to have a catch’ at the end, it gets me every time.”

You’d expect nothing less from the new LSU baseball coach, whose life was turned upside down when he accepted the job after 12 seasons at Notre Dame.

In a winter when he and the Tigers began practicing in earnest, in a time when more demands were made on his time through appearances and events than he could have ever imagined, he held fast that he wouldn’t miss his 12-year-old son’s basketball games.

Speaking of family, he and Karen have four children.

Nicolas, who played two seasons for his dad, graduated from Notre Dame. Alexandra is a senior at Ball State, while Samantha is a sophomore cheerleader at Notre Dame. And then there’s Thomas, who has no godmother but two godfathers, baseball legend Tommy Lasorda and Cubs GM Jim Hendry.

Taking the LSU job meant the Mainieris came full circle.

They met in 1975 at LSU, Karen Fejes then a sophomore from Belle Chase and Paul, a freshman major leaguer wannabe from Miami. His on-field career took a different path, back to Miami Dade Junior College and then two years at the University of New Orleans.

And then Mainieri got into coaching, first at small St. Thomas in Miami, then Air Force and Notre Dame.

“I’ve loved every place I’ve ever worked. At St. Thomas I was making $3,200 a year and was the happiest guy in the world.”

He’ll make 140 times that much this year at LSU, but you can rest assured that while he got a big raise to move to Baton Rouge, it wasn’t about the money: He says he not only had to take out a loan to write Notre Dame a buyout check for $446,000, but he now has to pay Alexandra’s way at the expensive private school.

“I never thought I would leave Notre Dame,” he says. “But then Skip (Bertman) called and this was literally the only place I would leave Notre Dame for.”

For Mainieri, it’s out of the icebox and into the fire, where LSU fans want someone to recapture the magic that Bertman had when he led the Tigers to five NCAA titles in 10 years.

At Notre Dame, Mainieri says, the Irish would always be ranked.

“I don’t want to be in the top 25,” he says. “I want to be in the top one.”