It was early in the 1984 season, and young Tony Gwynn was well on his way to forging his Hall of Fame career. That year, he would wind up leading the National League with 213 hits and a .351 average (30 points higher than the nearest competitor) and helped the Padres get to the World Series. Oh, and Gwynn added 33 stolen bases to the table as well.

But none of that mattered to the Padres' irascible manager, Dick Williams, one night in Cincinnati, when Williams found Gwynn's hustle lacking. Gwynn was summarily yanked from the game and told to report to the "principal's office" after the contest ended.

"I said, 'Hey, I screwed up, I didn't run down the line (hard),'" Gwynn told the Associated Press. He said, "You're damn right, that could have been the difference, we would have won the game, because if you were in right field,you make the play that (replacement) Bobby Brown didn't that cost us the game."'

"It was classic Dick Williams. He wasn't afraid of anybody; if he needed to say something to anyone, he would.

"Again, lesson learned. That didn't happen again."

This is one of the many stories passed along in the baseball world after Williams, who spent 21 years managing in the majors and is one of only two skippers to produce 90-plus victory seasons with four teams and one of two to win pennants with three teams, died Thursday morning at 82 from a ruptured aortic aneurism. He passed in a hospital near his home in Henderson, NV, just outside of Las Vegas.

San Francisco Giants' third-base coach Tim Flannery was a member of the San Diego team that made its unlikely bid to the World Series. If there were a player on the team who wasn't on the receiving end of a Williams tongue-lashing, Flannery wasn't one of them.

"We all have a story," Flannery said. "He calls you in and sits you down and says, "You can't throw, you can't hit and you can't run. So hustle, because that's all you can do. We're looking for another second baseman (Flannery's position) right now. But, oh yea, you're in there today, so don't screw up."

"He'd go to the mound and say, 'If you don't get this guy out, you're going to be in (the minors) tomorrow.'"

Flannery is also the source of one of the great quotes in San Diego sports lore. Summing up his relationship with Williams, Flannery famously said years ago, "I love playing for (him), but when I get out of the game, I'm going to run him over with my car."

Then, there was the unnamed Padre, who when asked for an assessment of Williams, sniffed, "His first name fits."

Despite the general lack of tact, Williams was universally known as a brilliant baseball man who squeezed every drop of talent from his players. Take a look at that 1984 Padres roster (which included current Giants manager Bruce Bochy, who was a backup catcher); other than Gwynn and Steve Garvey, it was a largely pedestrian lot.

Williams clearly wasn't in the manager's office to be everyone's best buddy, not that he was even capable of such a thing. But when it came to running a ballclub, his record shows he was one of the best who has ever done it. That he was enshrined into Baseball's Hall of Fame in 2008 shows the high regard with which he was held.

Asked to describe himself, Williams once said, "I was stern, but fair. If some guys couldn't stand the heat, then they don't belong in the major leagues. I don't know anybody who refused the world series checks I helped them get."

Richard Hirschfeld Williams was born on May 7, 1929 and graduated from Pasadena High School in 1947. As a player, he spent 13 seasons in the majors including parts of four with the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he was teammates with such luminaries as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella.

After his playing career ended with Boston in 1964, Williams took a job as player-coach with the Red Sox's Triple-A affiliate in Seattle. The following year, Williams was named manager of the team, which had moved to Toronto, and after back-to-back league championships, he was tabbed to manage the Red Sox.

It was hardly a plum position, even for one's first big-time job. The Sox hadn't won a pennant since 1946, they'd suffered through eight straight losing seasons and fans were apathetic about the team, to say the least. The Red Sox were coming off a ninth-place finish in the 10-team American League, ahead of only the Yankees, believe it or not.

However, under Williams, the Red Sox did the highly unlikely by winning the American League title, a feat not tarnished by their loss at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. The season was dubbed "The Impossible Dream", a term that resonates among New England baseball fans to this day.

"Players had great respect for him," Carl Yastrzemski, star of the '67 Red Sox squad, told the Boston Globe. "He worked hard and he wanted everybody to work hard. He was the right guy at the right time."

Former Red Sox player Ken Harrelson told the Globe, "He wasn't a good manager; he was a great manager."

Williams really made his mark on the game when he took over the Oakland Athletics in 1971. The A's were a rebellious bunch in what had been a button-down sport, known for their long hair, mustaches, idiosyncratic behavior and clubhouse brawling.

Nevertheless, this band of renegades and Williams, he of the sandpaper-like personality, turned out to be a perfect fit, because all that mattered to everyone involved was winning on the field. And the A's did plenty of that; Williams guided his charges to 101 victories in 1971, then to back-to-back World Series in '72 and '73.

"He came to us at a very good time in our development and certainly for me as a young player full of talent," Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, the leader of those A's teams, told the AP. "We were young and needed to understand how to go about winning and take the final step to becoming a great team. He was very important in that. He demanded excellence."

After leaving Oakland due to a dispute with then-owner Charlie Finely, Williams had stops with the Angels and Montreal Expos, where he didn't have a lot of success, though Montreal did win 95 games in 1979 and 90 the following year.

The resurrection of Williams' career came when he came to San Diego in 1982. Williams piloted the Padres to an 81-81 mark in his first two seasons. That might not sound like much, but prior to Williams' arrival, the team had finished over the break-even point once since the franchise's inception in 1969. Guiding the Padres, who had previously done nothing in their existence, to the World Series was arguably as impressive a feat as Williams pulled off with Boston in '67. The Detroit Tigers beat the Padres in the World Series, four games to one.

Williams' final year as Padres manager was 1985, then he spent two-plus seasons with the Seattle Mariners. In his managerial career, he compiled a 1571-1541 record.