Baker Is Bringing a Taste of the Big Time to Irvine : College basketball: Former Seton Hall assistant looks for a reversal of Anteater fortunes by relying on East Coast style.

Growing up in Philadelphia, Rod Baker was always close to big-time basketball, even if he sometimes had to sneak into games past the winks of cooperative ushers.

There was Big Five basketball at the Palestra--LaSalle, Penn, Temple, St. Joseph’s and Villanova would play doubleheaders--and any Philly basketball fan wanted to be there.

“There were two or three ways I always knew I could get in--I had some I saved for emergencies,” Baker said. “I’d sneak in and watch St. Joe’s and Villanova, LaSalle and Temple. It was always down to the wire, the place was always packed, and it was always 800 degrees hotter than anywhere else in the world. It was great.”

Baker played ball at Roman Catholic High School, where his coach was Speedy Morris, now the LaSalle coach. He went on to warm the bench at Holy Cross, the school that had produced Bob Cousy and Tommy Heinsohn years earlier. He started his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Holy Cross and went on to work as an assistant coach at Brown, Columbia and St. Joseph’s before spending five years as head coach at Tufts, a Division III school in Medford, Mass.

It seemed like he was never far from big-time basketball, spending his time in Boston and Providence, New York and Philadelphia, but Baker wasn’t part of it until after P.J. Carlesimo asked him to be an assistant at Seton Hall in 1988.

Nine months later, Seton Hall was in the Final Four, playing Michigan for the 1989 national championship, which Michigan won in overtime. Baker didn’t have to sneak in; he was escorted in.

Two years later, Baker, 39, landed his first Division I head coaching job, when UC Irvine named him to replace Bill Mulligan last April.

Baker said he would bring East Coast basketball to Irvine, and as practice begins today, even Irvine’s players are curious to see what is ahead.

“I have a feeling we’re not going to do too much offensive work the first few weeks,” said Don May, a senior center. “Better get ready for those defensive-slide drills.”

If Baker’s teams play the kind of defense he promises, it will be a departure from the tradition that arose at Irvine under Mulligan, who used to promise 100-point games and scoring titles, and figured that outrunning the other team would be defense enough. But over his last two seasons, Irvine won only 16 games, and last year Anteater opponents averaged 92 points per game, shooting 50% from the floor.

Baker--who says he likes his teams to run when given the opportunity--has lost the top three scorers from that 11-19 team, but he is intent that the Anteaters are going to make life difficult for the other team.

“He’s made the point clear he’s not going to tolerate anyone not playing defense,” May said.

Baker’s other obsession besides defense is punctuality, probably the result of 16 years in Catholic schools, he said.

The team’s 6 a.m. conditioning workouts are supposed to start on time. For every minute anyone is late, the team starts a minute earlier the next morning. Already this year, one workout began at 5:15 because of tardiness the previous day.

“I’m trying to impress on them that 5 o’clock means five of, or 10 of, not two after,” Baker said. “My guys don’t realize, I will leave people.”

The rules apply to Baker, too, it’s just that he’s never been late.

“The way I look at it, Coach Baker is really tough, but really fair,” May said.

Speedy Morris was Baker’s high school coach, but he didn’t become Baker’s role model.

“He’s a good person, a good-hearted person who can get excited,” Baker said. “He’ll yell and scream and get all over you. I was definitely afraid of him. He’s probably six feet--he’s a little fuller now than back then--and his eyes would kind of squint up and the volume would go up a little. He’d get after you.”

No, Baker said, he didn’t want to grow up to be like Morris.

“I just wanted to grow up, “ Baker said.

His junior year at Holy Cross, which is in Worcester, Mass., George Blaney became the coach.

“That’s the guy I wouldn’t mind growing up to be like,” Baker said. “I’ve never made a decision, basketball-wise, that I didn’t consult him first.”

Some of the things Baker admires in Blaney--who is still at Holy Cross--are his abilities as a game-preparation coach, a practice coach, and as “a very fine game coach.”

“The thing I admire most ,” Baker said, “is he has that innate ability to be wherever you’re trying to sneak away from. Like if there’s a curfew and you’re out, you figure if you come into the hotel through the kitchen and use the back stairs instead of the elevator . . . but he’ll be standing right there.”

Baker swears he was caught “every time” he did something wrong--and warns his players that he has learned the skill from Blaney.

Teasing aside, he says, “You just want to be around him, because you know at some time, he is going to say or do something you’re going to want to say or do.”

Baker says he learned a lot at Holy Cross, partly because he wasn’t busy playing. He was an English major and a skinny outside shooter who never started a college game. He is somewhat distressed to hear his players are impressed with what they have seen of his skills.

“I would like to be not good enough to make my own team,” he said, dryly.

Baker graduated in 1974, and his first coaching job was as a graduate assistant to Blaney in 1976. After a year, he took a job as an assistant at Brown, which was where he met his wife, Deborah, then a senior at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Baker moved on to Columbia, and then St. Joseph’s before being named head coach at Tufts, a Division III school in Medford, Mass., that was also a stepping stone for Texas Coach Tom Penders. It was 1983, and Baker was 31 during his first season as a head coach.

Baker stayed at Tufts for five seasons, compiling a record of 72-52, and Rocco J. Carzo, the school’s athletic director, credits him with turning the program around.

Baker found the experience he wanted--he learned that he could run his own team, and that he liked it--but he also found that when he applied for Division I jobs, nobody seemed to want a Division III coach.

He and Deborah were expecting what would be the first of their two children by then, and they made the somewhat difficult decision that he would leave Tufts to return to Division I as an assistant.

Blaney, Baker’s college coach, offered him a job in 1988. Even though Carlesimo had mentioned that Baker might fill the Seton Hall opening, nothing seemed to come of it. Baker accepted the Holy Cross job.

Not long after, Carlesimo called back, serious now about the Seton Hall job. After it had been offered to him, Baker approached Blaney anxiously. What he didn’t know was that Carlesimo had already contacted Blaney to let him know what was happening.

“Obviously, it was something I really wanted, to be at that level,” Baker said. “I didn’t know how to broach it. If he had told me I couldn’t go, I would not have gone. What he said was, ‘You can’t pass up that opportunity.’ ”

It turned out to be the road to the Final Four, and eventually Irvine.

Working with Carlesimo was like being in graduate school, Baker says, giving him a degree to go on top of his experience as a head coach.

But he knew he wanted to run his own show again.

“I love the opportunity to take a team and mold it and play at the highest level it can play,” he said. “That’s my dream. That’s my goal.”

With some talented transfers and recruits, Baker hopes to be laying the groundwork for progress at Irvine in the next few years. This year will be the year he and the players feel each other out.

Dave Feldman, a Laguna Beach resident and a sports anchor on a local cable channel, played for Baker at Tufts. He recalls Baker as a disciplinarian who likes to challenge his players.

“Players probably respect him more than like him--although I liked him,” Feldman said. “If he ran the hell out of you in practice, people weren’t going to walk out saying, ‘I love him.’ ”

During games, Feldman said, Baker likes to ride the referees in a subtle way.

“He talks to ‘em a lot. But very rarely does he absolutely scream and lose control. You’d never see him lose it like Bob Knight. He’s just pushing their buttons. It’s a contrived thing.”

Greg Vetrone, one of Baker’s assistants, admires Baker as a teacher--which is what Baker thought he would be before he decided to coach.

“He’s not going to be a hollerer and screamer, but he gets his point across,” Vetrone said. “The best thing about Rod Baker is he loves to teach. He’s a very good recruiter, relentless and all that. But you can only do so much in this game with X’s and 0’s. We all know those, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t teach it.

“I got to see him working with players at Seton Hall. You’re talking Anthony Avent, Ramon Ramos, guys who (had a chance to play) in the NBA. John Morton. They were very receptive to him.

“That’s Rod’s biggest thing. He can get in a player’s face one minute and (chew) ‘em out. Then he’ll turn around the next and pat ‘em on the butt and the kid will understand. He has a unique ability to get his point across, where kids buy into it and play that much harder.”