This bat, given to Dusty Baker by Felipe Alou, is part of a memorabilia collection so extensive that he needs an itemized inventory to keep track of it.

“What I saw,” the lawyer, Karen Hawkins, recalled in a telephone interview, “was a man whose honor and reputation are everything to him [and] somebody who was very angry because he had been so straightforward and honest [and] others wouldn’t treat him same way. He’s a very, very honorable man. They don’t make them like him anymore as far as I’m concerned.”

The Bakers’ beautiful house, full of mementos and, at this very moment, the comforting aroma of collard greens, is a testament to a lesson learned, a fortune rebuilt and a life renewed.

“I’ve been from the top to down near the bottom and back up again,” he says. “But you never forget what you went through. I don’t know if that contributed to my cancer — they talk about the stress being a factor — or my stroke. … That’s why all that stuff people say about me, none of it matters.”

[Baker wins his introductory news conference]

Baker wasn’t sure he would manage again. For a long time, teams weren’t calling him about their open jobs. In late October, when it appeared the Nationals’ job would go to Bud Black, he opened up to a reporter about baseball’s checkered history of minority hiring, at a moment when there were no African American managers in the game. (Baker’s eventual hiring and the Dodgers’ subsequent hiring of Dave Roberts brought the number to two.)

“I don’t know how much more backwards we can go,” he said then. “You wonder if it’s by accident or design.”

And now: “There were things a lot of us felt that you couldn’t easily say for fear you would never work again,” he says. “But after a while you get tired of being PC and sugar-coating things. What I said was true.”

When the Nationals came back to Baker with the job offer, he took it to his family, with Darren telling him, “It’s the chance of a lifetime, Dad.”

“Wrapping up [his career] on his terms. That’s what this is about,” Melissa says. “After all he’s accomplished, I think he deserves that.”

So he took the gig, even though his two-year contract guarantees him only about half the $3.5 million annual salary he made in Cincinnati, with additional incentives based on performance.

“Yeah, it bothered me somewhat,” he says of the low contract offer. “But that’s all right. I’ll make the rest of it up in incentives.”

A couple months after joining the Nationals, closer to Christmas, Baker settled into his spot on the leather sofa and watched “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as he does every year, and he thought about life, and about ringing bells and angels’ wings, and he cried a little, as he does every year.