What if Scott Rolen had chosen to remain with the Phillies?

Larry Bowa sat in the visiting manager’s office at Tropicana Field on June 12, 2001. The Phillies had dropped seven of nine games, including the opener of a series with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and Bowa was predictably annoyed.

That’s when a reporter knocked on the door.

In the next day’s Daily News, the headline yelled “Great Scott? Not,” above a column in which Bowa seemed to identify Scott Rolen as the culprit for the Phillies’ stagnating offense. Although he didn’t use the cleanup-hitting third baseman’s name, Bowa was quoted as saying, “If the No. 4 guy even makes contact in either Boston loss, we sweep the series. He’s killing us.”

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To this day, Bowa believes he was misquoted — or misconstrued. It hardly mattered then and certainly doesn’t now. Thirteen months later, the Phillies traded Rolen to St. Louis; 21 years after that, in July, Rolen got inducted into the Hall of Fame (as a Cardinal). The Phillies will add him to their Wall of Fame on Friday night, and it’s possible some unforgiving fans may boo his appearance on the field.

Because Rolen’s legacy in Philadelphia is ... well, it’s complicated. It’s also reductive and unfair, not to mention futile, to pinpoint that day at the Trop as the beginning of the end for Rolen with the Phillies. What’s done is done. History can’t be changed.

But in reflecting this week on his time spent with Rolen, Bowa brought it up anyway. What if he chose his words differently so as to leave no ambiguity about what he meant? What if he had a filter, like most other managers? What if he channeled his frustration in another way? What if?

“I said, ‘Man, the middle of our lineup is killing us,’ and Scotty came in the next morning and said, ‘What’s this, Bo? You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Bowa recalled. “I said, ‘Scotty, I’m not singling you out. It was you, Bobby Abreu, Pat Burrell.’ I said ‘the middle of our lineup.’ Probably could’ve used different words, no question about that.

“If you had a redo for me, it would’ve been, ‘As a lineup, we’re not hitting very good right now,’ instead of saying the middle of the lineup.”

For the sake of this exercise, let’s pretend he said that.

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The Phillies drafted Rolen in the second round in 1993 and developed him in the farm system. He got called up late in the 1996 season, was crowned National League Rookie of the Year in 1997, won the first of his eight Gold Gloves in 1998, and made the All-Star team in 2002.

But he played for teams that lost 94, 87, 85, and 97 games, barely sniffing the playoffs.

Rolen agreed in 1998 to a four-year, $10 million extension that bought out some of his arbitration years. But when the Phillies came to him about a long-term deal, he wanted to know that they were committed to using big-market resources, especially as they braced to move into a new ballpark in 2004, to build a team around him and compete annually for championships.

And two winning seasons in 16 years — with one of the lowest payrolls in the sport — didn’t inspire much confidence. Not in Rolen, and not, as Rolen saw it, in a demanding fan base that was just as hell-bent on winning as he was.

“I thought we, as an organization, were very candid about what the financial circumstances were playing in Veterans Stadium and the vision with regard to how that environment would change when we got into a new ballpark,” former general manager Ed Wade said this week. “Rolling the clock forward, you can see that’s exactly what happened. We thought we had a good plan in place with regard to getting good and staying good.

“But it took patience from the standpoint of the organization. And I’m sure for a veteran player, an All-Star-caliber player, it may have been a little tough to think, ‘Getting good and staying good is fine, but I’d rather see it happen sooner rather than later.’”

So, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if Rolen and Bowa were bosom buddies. Maybe there wasn’t anything that would have convinced Rolen to sign the Phillies’ six-year, $140 million offer in the winter of 2001-02 and forgo free agency a year later.

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“The question is, at that point, with two or three years down the road from the stadium, do you kind of commit your whole career, or do you see what free agency looks like?” Rolen said at his Hall of Fame news conference in July. “That was my decision at the time. And I understand the Phillies had to make a move.”

Indeed, once Rolen passed on nine figures and the Phillies fell out of the playoff race in 2002, they had little choice but to trade him. They sent him to St. Louis for infielder Plácido Polanco and pitchers Bud Smith and Mike Timlin.

But that also required the Phillies to tweak their vision.

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Wade and then-assistant GM Mike Arbuckle said the organization imagined moving into Citizens Bank Park with Rolen as the homegrown cornerstone player. Without him, the Phillies had to find another star. And in the winter of 2002-03, they signed Jim Thome to slug them from the Vet in 2003 to the Bank in 2004.

“It would’ve been great if we’d have been able to come to an agreement that would’ve kept Scott in a Phillies uniform for his entire career. And we tried that,” Wade said. “In retrospect, I think from time to time about, should we have tried to continue to move forward in the negotiations? But it became apparent that we weren’t going to get there. We had to continue to travel on the path that we set to get good and stay good.”

Rolen signed an eight-year, $90 million contract with the Cardinals — 51% less per season than the Phillies’ offer — and called St. Louis “baseball heaven.”

And that was before he won a World Series there in 2006.

But Rolen always insisted it wasn’t about money in Philadelphia. As Bowa put it, “Scotty wanted to play on a team that was going to get to the championship right away.” It was hard to see that happening in the winter of 2001-02, when Chase Utley and Ryan Howard were still in A-ball and the new ballpark was two seasons away.

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“It really, really hurt to see him go because I had the good fortune of knowing what we had going in the minor leagues and what I felt like was coming,” Arbuckle said. “But as a player at the major league level, you don’t have an opportunity to see the world from that viewpoint.”

There’s a temptation to imagine a Phillies infield that included Howard, Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Rolen. As Arbuckle said, “it would’ve been clearly one of the best infields ever.”

But this is also true: By the time the Phillies won it all in 2008, Rolen was 33, two years past the 11-year peak that got him into the Hall of Fame. In 2002, firmly in his prime, it was difficult for Rolen to remain patient.

“I’m not comparing players, but Mike Schmidt was a guy that people didn’t really appreciate at the beginning, and then, at the end, everybody recognized how great a player he was,” Bowa said. “I think Scotty was on that road. If he would’ve played here [longer], he would’ve gotten the recognition that these fans end up falling in love with a guy that plays the game the way he played it. If you play like he played, if he’d have played 15 years here, we wouldn’t even be talking about this.”

Maybe. It’s impossible to know. Rolen has talked graciously about his formative years with the Phillies. He cites longtime infield coach John Vukovich for turning him into an elite defender. He often says he learned to be a big leaguer with the Phillies.

Still, as Rolen gets set to receive one of the organization’s highest honors, everyone’s wondering how he’s going to be received.

“He should be remembered as one of the greatest players in the history of our franchise, which he is,” Wade said. “Yeah, he went to another organization. We traded him to another organization. These things happen. But that doesn’t detract from the things he did while he was in a Phillies uniform.”