Bing Devine, who transformed the St. Louis Cardinals and the Mets into World Series champions in the 1960s in a career spanning seven decades as a baseball executive, died Saturday in St. Louis. He was 90.

His death was announced by the Cardinals.

Devine played only a few games in professional baseball — as a second baseman in the low minors — but he became a highly successful judge of talent in the major leagues.

In his first stint as the Cardinals’ general manager, Devine shaped their World Series champion teams of 1964 and ’67, and the ’68 National League winners. He also created the foundation for the Mets’ stunning championship season of 1969.

Devine built Cardinals teams featuring pitcher Bob Gibson and outfielder Lou Brock, eventual Hall of Fame members, along with Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Bill White, Dick Groat, Julian Javier and Tim McCarver. His June 1964 trade of the starting pitcher Ernie Broglio to the Chicago Cubs for Brock proved among the most one-sided deals in baseball history. Broglio developed a sore arm, while Brock’s speed and hitting propelled the Cardinals for years.

As an executive for the Mets, Devine entered a three-team draft lottery that brought Tom Seaver, the future Hall of Fame pitcher, to New York. Seaver became the Mets’ ace when they won the 1969 World Series with a roster largely assembled by Devine.

Vaughan Devine, nicknamed Bing by an aunt, graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, his hometown, and held executive posts in the Cardinals’ minor-league system before joining their front office in 1955 and becoming general manager two years later.

Under Devine, the Cardinals, previously slow to integrate, acquired top-level African-American players like Gibson, Brock, White and Flood and became contenders in the National League. But their owner, Gussie Busch, fired Devine in mid-August 1964 when the team was seemingly out of the pennant race.

Devine was hired by the Mets six weeks later as a top assistant to George Weiss, the team president. Devine then watched the Cardinals overtake the Philadelphia Phillies to win the pennant. In a bizarre conclusion to that season, Johnny Keane, the Cardinals’ manager and Devine’s protégé, led them to a World Series victory over the Yankees, then quit and succeeded Yogi Berra as the Yankee manager. Devine was named by The Sporting News as the major league executive of the year for 1963 and 1964.

Devine’s greatest coup as a Mets executive was snaring Seaver, whose signing by theAtlanta Braves had been voided for breaking baseball rules. As Devine recalled it, Weiss was reluctant to spend the $50,000 the Mets would have to pay Seaver if they won a drawing for him in April 1966.

“George Weiss was against it,” Devine told Peter Golenbock in “Amazin’,” an oral history of the Mets. “He didn’t know anything about him. I made a big case, and I recall it was only hours before we had to make a decision and agree to that, and George Weiss finally shook his head, I’m sure not wanting to do it, and said, ‘If you people make such a big case of it, go ahead.’ ”

A year later, Seaver was pitching at Shea Stadium.

Devine, who succeeded Weiss as the Mets’ president, was rehired by the Cardinals as general manager in December 1967 and remained in the post until 1978. He was also an executive with the Phillies, the Houston Astros, the San Francisco Giants and the Montreal Expos, and the president of the N.F.L.’s St. Louis Cardinals.

At his death, more than 80 years after he saw the Cardinals play the Yankees in the 1926 World Series, he was working for the Cards as a special assistant for scouting.

He is survived by his wife, Mary; his daughters Joanne Schaumburg, Janice Devine and Jane Pilkington; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Devine once suggested there was an element to his success beyond a keen baseball mind. “You have to be lucky,” he told The Evansville Courier of Indiana in 2003. “And you’re never going to get lucky if you’re afraid to make a deal.”

Vaughan P Devine