Marty Marion, the St. Louis Cardinals’ celebrated slick-fielding shortstop, who was known as the Octopus for his long arms and uncanny range in gobbling up ground balls, died Tuesday in St. Louis. He was 93 and lived in Ladue, Mo.

His death was announced by his family.

The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and ’50s had Pee Wee Reese at shortstop, and the Yankees had the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto, both future Hall of Famers. Marion did not make it to Cooperstown, but he was regarded as among the era’s finest fielders at his position.

Known also as Slats for his slender frame, 6 feet 2 inches (unusually tall for a shortstop of his time) and 170 pounds or so, Marion helped propel the Cardinals to four pennants and three World Series championships, including one in 1944, when he was chosen the National League’s most valuable player.

He was an All-Star every season from 1943 to 1950, and he led National League shortstops in fielding percentage four times.

“He could go in the hole better than anyone I ever saw,” the Cardinals Hall of Famer Stan Musial told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1992. “He had the most accurate arm you ever saw.”

Although he delivered many a timely hit, Marion prided himself on his play in the field. He was even obsessed with picking up pebbles that might send a bad hop his way on a Sportsman’s Park infield baked hard by the St. Louis summer heat.

Marion played for the Cardinals from 1940 to 1950, managed them for one season, then became a player-manager with the St. Louis Browns in 1952 and 1953. He later managed the Chicago White Sox.

When he won the MVP award for the Cardinal team that defeated the St. Louis Browns for the championship, he batted only .267 but displayed his customary brilliance in the field.

“Around St. Louis there’s a sense of the history of the game,” Joe Torre, who played for the Cardinals and managed them, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “He was the one you measured against.”

Martin Whiteford Marion was born on Dec. 1, 1917, in Richburg, S.C., but grew up in Atlanta. After playing the infield in high school and briefly attending Georgia Tech, he was signed by the Cardinals’ organization in 1936.

Deferred from military service because of a childhood leg injury, Marion played on Cardinals teams that dominated Major League Baseball during World War II.

The ”42 Cardinals — also featuring Musial, Enos Slaughter and Terry Moore in the outfield, Walker Cooper at catcher, and the pitchers Mort Cooper and Johnny Beazley — defeated the Yankees in the World Series. The Cardinals lost to the Yankees in the 1943 World Series, then defeated the Browns in the so-called Streetcar Series of 1944, played entirely at Sportsman’s Park.

The Cardinals won another pennant in 1946 and defeated the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. That summer, in the first stirrings of a movement eventually leading to unionization, Marion devised the basis for a players’ pension plan financed by management and the ballplayers.