Tommy Henrich, the right fielder known as Old Reliable who helped propel the Yankees to seven World Series championships, died on Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio. He was 96.

His death was announced by the Yankees.

Playing with the Yankees for 11 seasons, Henrich was a timely hitter, an outstanding defensive player and a leader who epitomized the image of the classy Yankee who nearly always won.

He was part of a celebrated outfield, teaming with Joe DiMaggio in center and Charlie Keller in left. Making his debut under Manager Joe McCarthy and concluding his career with Casey Stengel’s powerful postwar clubs, he played on Yankees teams that won eight pennants.

Babe Ruth, Roger Maris and Reggie Jackson are the most illustrious names in right field at Yankee Stadium, and Henrich’s statistics, though impressive, were hardly eye-popping. But he was renowned for getting a hit when a game was on the line and for his all-around play and dedication.

“He was at his best in the big games, and he never made a mistake in the outfield,” Bobby Brown, the former Yankees third baseman, said Tuesday in an interview. “And as he grew older, he was very helpful to younger players. He told them what it was like to be a Yankee.”

At his death, Henrich (pronounced HEN-rick) was the oldest living Yankee and the last survivor of their teams of the 1930s, the Elias Sports Bureau said.

A five-time All-Star, Henrich played from 1937 (he was a teammate of Lou Gehrig’s) to 1950, except for a three-year break for military service in World War II. He batted better than .300 three times, compiling a lifetime average of .282, and he hit 183 home runs. He led the American League in runs (138) in 1948 and in triples in 1947 (13) and in ’48 (14).

Henrich got his nickname during a game with the Philadelphia Athletics.

“The score was tied in the late innings, and the Yankees had to catch a train,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1989. “I got a hit that won the game, and broadcaster Mel Allen said: ‘Good old reliable Henrich. Looks like we’ll catch the train after all.’ ”

Henrich was born on Feb. 20, 1913, in Massillon, Ohio, a cradle of professional football. There were few good baseball fields around, so he played softball through his high school years, then joined a town baseball team.

He was signed by the Cleveland Indians organization in the fall of 1933 and hit well over .300 in three seasons in the minors. But in 1937, he was still a minor leaguer, so he wrote to the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, asking if he was being treated fairly. Landis ruled that the Indians were improperly denying him an opportunity to play in the majors and said he could sign with another team. In April 1937, the Yankees signed him for what was reported to be a $20,000 bonus.

“Cleveland was more or less the big local club, the closest one to Massillon, but I’d never been a Cleveland rooter,” Henrich said in “Baseball Between the Lines,” Donald Honig’s oral history of the game in the 1940s and ’50s. “I was a Yankee fan since 1921, when I was 8 years old. I was a Babe Ruth man.”

Playing right field at Yankee Stadium, he succeeded George Selkirk, who had taken over the position when Ruth departed.

Henrich was admired as a smart outfielder with a strong arm who worked incessantly to hone his skills, studying how opposing batters hit the ball and even gauging wind currents.

He played a role in three memorable World Series moments against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In the 1941 Series, he swung and missed for strike three and what seemed to be the final out of Game 4, which would have tied the Series at two games apiece. But the Dodgers’ catcher, Mickey Owen, committed a passed ball that led to the winning rally.

“Even as I was trying to hold up, I was thinking that the ball had broken so fast that Owen might have trouble with it, too,” Henrich said in “Baseball Between the Lines.”

“I saw that little white jackrabbit bouncing and I said, ‘Let’s go.’ It rolled all the way to the fence. I could have walked down to first.”

The Yankees captured the Series the next day.

In Game 4 of the 1947 Series, Cookie Lavagetto’s two-run double that broke up Bill Bevens’s no-hitter with two out in the ninth inning caromed off Henrich’s glove after hitting the right-field wall at Ebbets Field, allowing Brooklyn’s Eddie Miksis to score the winning run. The Yankees took the Series in seven games.

In the final game of the 1949 season, Henrich hit a home run at Yankee Stadium in the Yankees’ pennant-winning victory over the Boston Red Sox. And in Game 1 of the 1949 World Series, his ninth-inning home run at Yankee Stadium off the Dodgers’ Don Newcombe brought a 1-0 triumph. The Yankees won that Series in five games.

After his playing days ended, Henrich spent one year as a Yankees coach, tutoring Mickey Mantle in his rookie season. He later coached for the New York Giants and the Detroit Tigers and worked in sports broadcasting.

His death leaves Virgil Trucks, 92, a longtime pitcher who appeared briefly for the Yankees in 1958, as the team’s oldest surviving player, the Elias bureau said.

Henrich is survived by his daughters Patricia Henrich, Mary Henrich and Ann Erwin, his sons Tom and Paul, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Eileen, died in March.

Henrich’s dedication on the field was matched by a reputation for strength of character. As Stengel put it in a 1949 profile of Henrich in The New Yorker: “He’s a fine judge of a fly ball. He fields grounders like an infielder. He never makes a wrong throw, and if he comes back to the hotel at 3 in the morning when we’re on the road and says he’s been sitting up with a sick friend, he’s been sitting up with a sick friend.”

Thomas D Henrich