Moments later, Steve Carlton, 77, ambled toward the home dugout, a slight hitch in his step, and stopped briefly to sign a couple of baseballs for Phillies starter Zack Wheeler. When members of the 1980 World Series champion club were introduced before that Aug. 7 game against the Nationals — part of a players’ alumni event to commemorate the club’s first title — Carlton’s name was called last, and the pitcher nicknamed “Lefty” drew the loudest cheers among the 28,672 fans in attendance.

Carlton and the other 1980 teammates in attendance then retreated indoors to a conference room for a media event, but the Hall of Fame left-hander didn’t wait long to make his exit.

» READ MORE: The summer of Super Steve still sticks to the soul of this fan who saw greatness up close

“No, not a good time,” Carlton said, when approached by a reporter, keeping with his long-standing tradition (with a few exceptions) of shunning the media. Carlton slipped into a waiting elevator nearby and escaped the maw, leaving former teammate and baseball’s career hits leader, Pete Rose, to clean up his own mess. Before the game, Rose called a female Inquirer reporter “babe” and avoided a question about his past sexual misconduct allegations.

But Carlton did not disappear entirely from public view that Sunday. In the third inning of a Phillies 13-1 thumping of the Nats, Carlton made a rare appearance in the broadcast booth, and joined former Phillies teammates Bob Boone and Larry Bowa, in addition to broadcasters Tom McCarthy and John Kruk. McCarthy asked Carlton about any recollections of his historic 1972 season — the left-hander’s debut campaign with the Phillies when he went 27-10 and recorded 310 strikeouts — only to have the four-time Cy Young Award-winner deftly squash the topic.

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“I don’t live there, you know that,” said Carlton, who instead made several awkward remarks of his own during the booth visit, at one point joking that U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “wants to date” the Phillie Phanatic mascot. “That’s a political joke,” Carlton said.

There would be no Carlton reflections on the 50th anniversary of his otherworldly pitching stats from 1972, nor any personal memories expressed by him about the franchise-turning trade in February that same year, the one that brought Carlton to the Phillies and sent right-hander Rick Wise to the St. Louis Cardinals. Instead, it is left to former teammates and opponents, historians and baseball cognoscenti to dissect Carlton’s pitching greatness and eccentric personality, his signature wipeout slider, reclusive post-baseball life in Colorado, his love for a vintage wine and his place among the Cooperstown greats.

“Carlton and [Sandy] Koufax are the two best left-handers I ever faced,” said Rose in a phone interview months before the Aug. 7 ceremony at Citizens Bank Park. “[Carlton] was a gamer. I’ve just got the utmost respect for him as a pitcher and a guy. He was a great teammate. He hated to [expletive] lose.”

In one of his last moves as the Phillies general manager, John Quinn orchestrated the transaction that would change the course of the franchise’s fortunes — from perennial doormat to eventual world champions. The deal didn’t save Quinn’s job — he was replaced by Paul Owens later that 1972 season — but it saved the Phillies from becoming a daily punchline.

Carlton was already a World Series champion with the 1967 Cardinals when Quinn and Cardinals GM Bing Devine swapped aces in February 1972. Cardinals owner August A. Busch Jr. had ordered Devine to trade Carlton due to a contract dispute: Reportedly, the Cards offered $55,000 and Carlton was holding out for $65,000. In one instant, Carlton went from being paired with Hall of Famer Bob Gibson in the Cardinals’ fearsome starting rotation to pitching for the basement-dwelling Phillies.

“That sort of devastated me.”

“That sort of devastated me. [The Cardinals] called me up at like 8:30 or 9 o’clock in the morning and told me I was traded,” Carlton told Reggie Jackson in a taped 1989 interview for the show, “Greatest Sports Legends.” The episode, which aired in 1990, is one of the few interviews of the pitcher in which he opens up on a wide range of topics.

“My mind just started racing, because in those days being traded was more of a negative concept than it is today,” Carlton told Jackson. “I called Bing back after I thought about it. ‘Can I change anything?’ He says, ‘It’s too late. It’s a done deal.’ It really upset me.”

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Despite the reversal of fortune, Carlton’s performance on the mound in 1972 — which began with a players’ strike — defies logic, and to this day still leaves former players like Jackson and Bowa, and Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Costas in awe.

“Unbelievable,” said Jackson, 76, in a recent phone interview. “Maybe the most incredible pitching effort. You go look at the complete games [30] and innings pitched [346⅓]. You see Carlton, Gibson and some of those guys that had [expletive] four hits, five hits per nine [innings]. You had a long day coming, buddy.”

Bowa was only in his third season with the Phillies when Carlton came aboard, and he said the team then was still in transition, with key players like Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski and Bob Boone still developing.

“That year [1972] stands out in my mind,” said Bowa, 76. “I don’t think anybody will ever do that again — win that many games on a team that only won 59 games. You look back and say, ‘He did what?!’ On days he pitched, the only thing he would say when he walked through the door was, ‘Today’s win day, boys.’”

Costas said Carlton’s 1972 season — after which he won the first of his four Cy Young Awards — is all the more remarkable because he pitched for such a terrible team.

“Even absent his team’s futility on the days Carlton didn’t pitch, he goes 27-10 for the season,” Costas said. “He throws 30 complete games, throws over 300 innings. And his ERA is under 2.00 [1.97]. That’s not just Cy Young stuff, that’s among the greatest of the great individual seasons, even if it had been achieved with a pennant-winning team.”

Carlton developed a strong bond and friendship with catcher Tim McCarver in St. Louis after Carlton was first called up in 1965. But McCarver was traded to the Phillies before the 1970 season, and when Carlton arrived in Philly in 1972, his reunion with McCarver was short-lived, as McCarver was dealt to the Montreal Expos in a mid-season trade.

McCarver, 80, said it was Gibson who taught Carlton how to throw the slider that would become Lefty’s most intimidating pitch, and on days Carlton took the mound and McCarver was his batterymate, McCarver knew what signal to drop.

“It was like, ‘How could it be breaking that much?’ ... You could hear the spin.”

“Lefty was never a standard-stuff pitcher. He was the guy who had to have the slider to win,” McCarver said during an Aug. 7 interview at Citizens Bank Park. “If [Carlton] forgot his slider, then he was not the same pitcher. I made sure when I started catching Lefty, that I called for his slider. I used to hear opposing players say, ‘That slider’s wicked.’ It was made for nastiness.”

Bobby Valentine, only in his second full season playing for the Dodgers, had the misfortune of facing Carlton during the epic 1972 stretch of dominance. Valentine — who later managed three teams, including the 2000 World Series runner-up Mets — said road games at Veterans Stadium when the tall Phillies southpaw was starting were an exercise in futility.

“In Philadelphia, I have vivid recollections of [Carlton] walking in front of our dugout before the game, and how silent we became when he walked by,” said the 72-year-old Valentine, a right-handed hitter who was 4-for-24 (.167 average) lifetime against Carlton. “It was my first experience with a breaking ball that dove into my back foot. It was like, ‘How could it be breaking that much?’ His slider was one of the few, when I batted, you could hear the spin.”

Valentine’s teammates in 1972 included Steve Garvey and Manny Mota, who both had long Dodger tenures and faced Carlton throughout the ‘70s, including in the second half of the decade when the clubs met twice in the postseason.

“[Carlton] was a tough, tough lefty, and he don’t give an inch.”

“[Carlton] was a tough, tough lefty, and he don’t give an inch,” said Mota, 84. “He was always working ahead of the hitter. One night, the bases are loaded with two outs, and I pinch hit for Dusty Baker. Carlton, he goes one, two, three [strikes] to me and game over. I come inside [the clubhous]), see Dusty, and he say, ‘Manny, I couldn’t have done [expletive] against him, either.’”

Garvey, 73, said he couldn’t ever remember a bad Carlton start, and even then, the opposing batter had to hope for a mistake.

“He could run that fastball away,” said Garvey, a right-handed hitter who was a career 16-for-83 (.193) against Carlton, with 11 strikeouts and four homers. “And then that tight slider down and in. Always a challenge. But I loved facing him.

“I remember one at-bat, a Sunday day game in Philly. [Carlton] used to try to get me out down and in. Six times in a row, he threw it in the same spot,” said Garvey, the 1974 National League MVP. “My philosophy is, ‘Thou shalt not walk or take.’ Finally he throws a fastball up a little bit and I take it to right. That one-on-one battle between the pitcher and the batter is probably the ultimate in sports.”

Carlton’s march through the 1970s after his arrival in Philly was not all smooth sailing, however. Before McCarver’s return to the Phillies in 1975, Boone had to learn the ropes catching the veteran left-hander, starting in 1973. As Boone describes it, Carlton didn’t mince words when he had a beef.

“Lefty had a lot of trouble with me. He was fighting me for my calls. He didn’t like ‘em,” Boone said. “He really felt that I didn’t do a good job for him.”

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But Boone’s relationship with Carlton eventually improved, helped by McCarver’s return and by Boone’s own development into an All-Star and Gold Glove catcher. “Lefty started realizing that I was pretty good, and then we had no problems,” Boone said.

The Fourth Estate wasn’t so fortunate. The rift between Carlton and reporters can be traced to his early days in Philly, and Rose said he thinks it was the late baseball writer and columnist Bill Conlin who sparked the forever feud after a story he wrote.

“I decided [the media] could do a better job writing without my quotes.”

“Steve just said, ‘I’ll never talk to the press again.’ And he was consistent about it,” Rose said. “Whenever Carlton pitched at the Vet, after the game, he’d go in the trainer’s room until the press would leave. Consequently, the press had to go talk to McCarver, because they got no quotes from Steve Carlton.”

Carlton had a slightly different take on his spurning of the media when he was interviewed by Jackson in 1989 for the “Greatest Sports Legends” episode, labeling reporters “an obstacle that interfered with my performance on the field.

“I decided they could do a better job writing without my quotes,” Carlton told Jackson.

Jackson said in a recent interview that Carlton “doesn’t do well with normal people that have small talk and don’t have meaningful conversations.

“He doesn’t participate in that at all, and I admire him,” Jackson said.

The freeze-out seemed to work to Carlton’s advantage, at least on the field. He picked up a second Cy Young in 1977 (23-10) and a third in 1980 (24-9), when the Phillies finally reached the mountaintop. Carlton was 3-0 that postseason, and started the clinching World Series Game 6 against the Royals at the Vet.

“Carlton and Koufax were different pitchers in the postseason,” Jackson said. “They still threw their glove on the mound and you had hell for nine innings.”

“Obviously, Carlton had a good fastball and he had a wicked slider. My approach was, try to hit the fastball,” said George Brett, the Hall of Fame Royals third baseman who batted .375 in that 1980 Fall Classic, including three hits and a walk off Carlton over two games. “The only slider you’re going to hit is a bad slider. No one is going to hit his good one. First fastball he would throw me, I would try to attack. I didn’t care if it was three inches inside, three inches high, three inches low, or three inches outside. I tried to hit every fastball I could.”

“Carlton and Koufax were different pitchers in the postseason... you had hell for nine innings.”

Brett couldn’t carry his team that October, and Bowa said that after the Game 5 Phillies win in Kansas City to go up 3-2 in the series, the champagne celebration was all but guaranteed.

“I respect every guy that puts on a uniform on the other team, but I said to a couple of my teammates, ‘This series is over. We got Carlton going at the Vet, packed house, and a clinching win,’” Bowa said.

That proved to be Carlton’s only World Series title with the Phillies. He won his fourth Cy Young in 1982 (23-11), and although the club got back to the World Series in 1983, the Orioles rolled over them in five games. Carlton bounced around to four other clubs after his release by the Phillies in 1986, and by 1988 he was finished at age 43.

In the ensuing years, Carlton became more reclusive, save for his first-ballot election to Cooperstown in 1994. He did a smattering of interviews in advance of joining the other Hall of Fame greats, but in at least one story that appeared in Philadelphia magazine, Carlton was accused of being anti-Semitic. Carlton denied the allegations.

Now, Carlton mostly stays out of the limelight, save for the occasional appearances like the one Aug. 7 in Philly or when he returns to Cooperstown. Turns out, the enigmatic personality is not so great a mystery within baseball circles.

“One of the things that Carlton’s always said to me is, ‘Reggie, you could be a friend of mine anytime. I always have admired you because you’re honest. You’re pure.’ That’s who Steve Carlton is to me,” Jackson said.

“It’s not like talking to a normal guy with Carlton. I’d love to see what the world looks like through his eyes.”

“I know him a little bit. He lives in Durango [Colo.],” Brett said. “He’s in his own little world, which is great. A lot of players are. I sit at the same table as [Carlton] a lot of times at the dinner we have in Cooperstown with Hall of Fame players only. I kind of call it the wine snob table.

“We all bring a bottle of good wine and we sit around and drink it. It’s good conversation. It’s not like talking to a normal guy with Carlton. I’d love to see what the world looks like through his eyes.”