Larry Lucchino, a top executive for three Major League Baseball teams who helped launch a trend of cozy downtown ballparks with the construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards and later was instrumental in rebuilding the Boston Red Sox, which won three World Series championships under his leadership, died April 2 at 78.

The Red Sox and Major League Baseball released a statement from his family confirming the death. The cause and location of his death were not disclosed. He had been treated at least three times for different forms of cancer, including kidney cancer in 2019.

Mr. Lucchino (pronounced loo-KEE-no) was a Yale-educated lawyer who once served as an investigator for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal. In four decades as an executive with the Orioles, San Diego Padres and Red Sox, he had a transformative effect on how sports franchises operate and on how they interact with their communities. He served on committees that oversaw baseball’s financial structure, league realignment, television contracts and international growth.

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“Larry Lucchino was one of the most accomplished executives that our industry has ever had,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.

Mr. Lucchino became a sports executive after working at Williams & Connolly, the Washington law firm then led by Edward Bennett Williams, who was a part owner of Washington’s National Football League team and also the team president.

When Williams bought the Baltimore Orioles in 1979, he named Mr. Lucchino the club’s vice president and general counsel. He had held similar posts with Washington’s NFL team, renamed the Commanders in 2022.

After Williams’s death in 1988, Mr. Lucchino bought a small ownership stake in the Orioles and, as team president, guided the club’s efforts to build a new stadium in downtown Baltimore. Drawing on his memories of Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where he grew up, Mr. Lucchino worked with architects to create an intimate ballpark that would blend into the fabric of the city. He insisted on using the term “ballpark” and would impose a $5 fine on any Orioles employee who called it a stadium.

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The Orioles’ ballpark was built on the site of an old rail yard in Baltimore, with its 19th-century brick warehouses forming a prominent backdrop beyond the outfield wall. The structure was made of brick and steel, not concrete, with views of the Baltimore skyline visible from the seats. Fans sat near the field, putting them close to the action. The concourses where food was sold offered unobstructed views of the field. The ballpark was close to public transit, marking a turn away from suburban stadiums surrounded by acres of parking lots.

“We didn’t know that we were going to ignite a revolution in ballpark architecture,” Mr. Lucchino told the Associated Press in 2021. “We just wanted to build a nice little ballpark.”

When Camden Yards opened in 1992, it was hailed as a breakthrough in stadium design, heralding the way for many other downtown athletic facilities, including Nationals Park in Washington.

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“I believe of all the developments that changed the game,” former baseball commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig told the Boston Globe in 2002, “Camden Yards is in the top two or three of the 20th century. It changed everything. And I think Larry was the most important person in that project.”

After the Orioles were purchased in 1993 by Baltimore lawyer Peter Angelos, who died March 23 at 94, Mr. Lucchino left the club and became team president of the San Diego Padres. He transformed a losing team into a National League pennant winner in four years, then spearheaded a movement to build a new downtown stadium, Petco Park, in San Diego.

Mr. Lucchino, who described himself as a “scorched-earth kind of guy” and admitted that “I’ve made a few enemies,” left San Diego after disagreements with principal owner John Moores.

In 2002, Mr. Lucchino moved to Boston, which he called “the top of the mountain” for a baseball executive. Joining primary owner John Henry and team chairman Tom Werner, Mr. Lucchino — who also owned a share of the franchise — set about rebuilding the Red Sox, which had broken the hearts of generations of New Englanders since its last World Series title in 1918.

One of his first moves was to bring 28-year-old Theo Epstein to Boston from San Diego as the game’s youngest general manager. Epstein, a Yale graduate and lifelong Red Sox fan who had grown up in the Boston area, was part of a growing trend to apply statistical analysis to a club’s decision-making. Mr. Lucchino was also instrumental in hiring Terry Francona as the Red Sox manager and became known for describing the team’s archrivals, the New York Yankees, as the “Evil Empire.”

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With a reshaped roster and renewed energy in the front office, the Red Sox overtook the Yankees to advance to the 2004 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Behind such stars as Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Curt Schilling, the team rolled to a four-game sweep to claim its first title in 86 years.

The championship “reversed the curse,” the long-held belief that the Red Sox were doomed after the team owner sold off its best player, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees in 1919. The Red Sox went on to win the World Series again in 2007 and 2013. (They won again in 2018 after Mr. Lucchino had retired.)

During Mr. Lucchino’s years in Boston, some people in the city and in the Red Sox organization had proposed demolishing Fenway Park, where the Red Sox had played since 1912, to build a new facility. Mr. Lucchino, who valued baseball’s history and understood the sport’s deep connections to its fans, would not countenance such a move.

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“Have you learned nothing?” he said when another team executive asked about tearing down the old ballpark. “You don’t destroy the Mona Lisa. You preserve the Mona Lisa.”

Instead, he directed a $250 million renovation of the oldest park in the major leagues, adding more seating and renovating the cramped and decrepit locker rooms and offices. Fenway Park remains a jewel of the game and a pilgrimage site for baseball fans around the world.

Princeton and Yale

Lawrence Lucchino was born Sept. 6, 1945, in Pittsburgh. His father had a small grocery store and later worked as a clerk for a judge. His mother was a secretary and accounting clerk.

He and an older brother grew up in a neighborhood near Forbes Field, the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. “Forbes Field was across the street from the library, which was across the street from the YMCA, which was across the street from a pizza place,” Mr. Lucchino recalled in a 2002 interview with the Globe. “So you had all your essential elements of life in one system.”

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He was an infielder on his high school baseball team, then played basketball at Princeton University. He was a backup point guard on Princeton’s 1965 Final Four team, which was led by Bill Bradley, who later starred for the New York Knicks and became a U.S. senator.

Mr. Lucchino received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1967 and graduated from Yale Law School in 1971. He was in law school at the same time as Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In Washington, Mr. Lucchino served on a Watergate investigative panel with Hillary Clinton before joining Williams & Connolly in 1975. He eventually became a partner and was close to the firm’s namesake founder, describing him as a father figure and friend.

Mr. Lucchino was chairman of the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-area charity, and helped lead fundraising efforts for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

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His marriage to Stacey Ballard ended in divorce. Survivors include a brother.

After Mr. Lucchino retired from the Red Sox in 2015, one of his protégés, Sam Kennedy, succeeded him as team president. Mr. Lucchino then formed a group to buy the Pawtucket Red Sox, the club’s top minor league club. He moved the team to Worcester, Mass., where he oversaw construction of a 9,500-seat ballpark that opened in 2021. He sold the club last year.

Mr. Lucchino said he learned a valuable lesson as a sports executive in the late 1970s, when he helped Williams interview Bobby Beathard for the job as general manager of Washington’s NFL team.

“I love the guy,” Mr. Lucchino said. “But he can’t balance his checkbook.”

“We’ve got 10 guys that can balance his checkbook,” Williams replied.

“That’s always been a sine qua non for me when it comes to baseball front office people,” Mr. Lucchino told the Sports Business Journal in 2021. “Can they evaluate talent? Because 10 other guys can balance the checkbook.”

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