Dick Williams, the hard-nosed Hall of Fame manager who achieved the rare feat of taking three different teams to the World Series, died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 82.

His death was reported by Major League Baseball on its Web site. The cause was believed to be a brain aneurysm.

A journeyman outfielder with a weak arm although he played in the major leagues for 13 seasons, Williams studied baseball strategy when he was sitting on the bench. His savvy and intensity served him well in turning losing ball clubs into pennant winners in his 21 seasons as a manager.

Insisting that his players hustle, avoid mental errors and pay attention to fundamentals, Williams took the Boston Red Sox to their “impossible dream” American League pennant of 1967, the Oakland A’s to World Series championships in 1972 and 1973, and the San Diego Padres to the National League pennant in 1984.

Williams and Bill McKechnie are the only managers to lead three franchises to the World Series, and Williams was among seven managers to win pennants in both leagues. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2008.

Managing the A’s, Williams had formidable lineups led by Reggie Jackson, Bert Campaneris, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace and Joe Rudi, and outstanding pitching staffs featuring Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, Blue Moon Odom and Rollie Fingers.

But the early 1970s were a tempestuous and bizarre time in Oakland, the players sometimes fighting among themselves while pitted against a strong-willed manager in Williams and a meddling club owner in Charlie Finley, who outfitted them in green and gold and allowed his mule mascot, Charlie O., to roam the outfield during batting practice.

“This team was basically 25 versions of me,” Williams said in his 1990 memoir, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” written with Bill Plaschke. “They didn’t care about their appearance (we looked like damn hippies) or their deportment (we fought like sailors),” he recalled, adding that they didn’t care about “anything but winning.”

When Williams was voted into the Hall of Fame, his former pitching stars paid tribute. Fingers, converted by Williams from a starter to a reliever, credited him with providing the approach that propelled him to the Hall of Fame. And Blue said Williams was essential to the A’s success.

“When you think of the ’70s, you think of Dick Williams and the A’s doing their thing,” Blue told The San Francisco Chronicle. “He’s always joking about how he rode our coattails, but he’s the one who taught us to play winning baseball. Dick Williams was that X-factor.”

Born in St. Louis on May 7, 1929, Williams moved with his family to the Los Angeles area as a youngster and was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers’ organization out of high school in 1947.

He was schooled in baseball fundamentals at Dodgertown, the innovative training base in Vero Beach, Fla., where Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager, assembled a corps of instructors teaching every minor leaguer in the organization the fine points of the game.

Williams joined the Dodgers in 1951, saw little action as a rookie, then separated a shoulder diving for a fly ball in left field in August 1952. He never regained his arm strength, but he became a versatile player, appearing in the outfield and at first, second and third base with the Dodgers, the Baltimore Orioles, the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Athletics and the Boston Red Sox. He hit 70 home runs and had a career batting average of .260.

After managing in the Red Sox farm system for three seasons, Williams was named the Boston manager in 1967, taking over a team that finished ninth the previous season and had not won a pennant in 21 years.

Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, had a reputation for coddling his players, but everything changed when Williams arrived. He stripped the star left fielder Carl Yastrzemski of his captain’s designation to make clear that he was the only one in charge, and he demanded dedication from all his players. Yastrzemski captured the batting triple crown, Jim Lonborg won 22 games and the Red Sox won a four-way pennant race by a single game. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in a seven-game World Series, but Williams had engineered a memorable summer.

The Red Sox finished fourth the next season and were en route to a third-place finish in 1969 when Williams was fired in late September. After he coached for a season with the Montreal Expos, he was hired by Finley to manage the A’s.

Williams took the A’s to World Series victories over the Cincinnati Reds’ Big Red Machine in 1972 and the Mets in 1973. But during that ’73 Series he told his players that he was quitting, incensed by Finley’s attempt to remove second baseman Mike Andrews from the roster with a phantom injury after Andrews had made a pair of errors, a maneuver disallowed by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In departing, Williams took with him an enduring flourish: a mustache to match the facial embellishments of his ballplayers.

George Steinbrenner named Williams to manage the Yankees after the ’73 season, but the deal fell through when Finley insisted on receiving two leading prospects as compensation.

After managing the California Angels (1974-76) and the Expos (1977-81), Williams was hired to manage the Padres, an expansion team created in 1969. In 1984, he took them to their first pennant. Fired after the 1985 season, he then managed the Seattle Mariners for three seasons. Steinbrenner hired Williams as an adviser and scout in 1993, and he remained with the Yankees for 10 years.

Williams and his wife, Norma, had two sons, Rick and Mark, and a daughter, Cathy. Williams had a brother, Ellery. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

When Williams was named to the Hall of Fame, he surveyed a baseball world that had undergone huge changes from his heyday. Ballplayers had become millionaires with the arrival of free agency and were presumably far less inclined to accept the edicts of a hard-line manager.

“I wouldn’t last a week,” Williams told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

But he defended his approach.

“If some guys couldn’t stand the heat, then they didn’t belong in the major leagues,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who refused the World Series checks I helped them get.”

Richard Hirschfeld Williams