William Benjamin Arce Jr., a pioneering college baseball coach and legendary international ambassador for the sport with Hawaii ties, has died.

He was 90.

Arce was the founding athletic director and baseball coach at Claremont Colleges in Calif., where he had a 606-472-7 record and earned a place in the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1982 and won the prestigious Lefty Gomez Award in 2001 for contributions to the college game.

Stuart Ho, a Claremont graduate, recalls, “Arce was hired around 1956 to put together a baseball team. We had at the time no gym, no locker room, and no athletic field, but CMC did own a huge piece of flat real estate across from the dorms, and that was good enough for Arce.”

Ho said, “… Anything CMC has today in the way of athletics started with Arce. He was a true pioneer. He was given a big, empty field and told to make something happen. Everyone on campus knew that’s all he had to work with, and that’s probably why he was so admired by generations of students. Entrepreneurship was always CMC’s mantra, and oddly Arce was proof of what the school was supposed to be about.”

Arce learned the game from his father, Bill Sr., a veteran of the Hawaii Baseball League.

A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, Arce Jr. returned to Europe in the 1960s and ’70s to hold baseball clinics and coached national teams in the Netherlands, France and Italy, leading each of them to European Championships.

BaseballReference.com says he taught or coached the sport in 15 European countries as well as China. He also coached Team USA and founded the International Sports Group.

Businessman Duane Kurisu, a part owner of the San Francisco Giants and founder of Hawaii Winter Baseball, said, “Bill Arce was a baseball man’s baseball man, a true ambassador of the game. We could spend hours talking baseball with him and wonder where the time all went. He was a mentor and friend to so many people and you can count me as one of them.”