Y. A. Tittle, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Giants to three consecutive National Football League championship games in the early 1960s after the San Francisco 49ers had discarded him as too old and too slow, died on Sunday night in Stanford, Calif. He was 90.

Louisiana State University, where he played his college ball, announced his death.

Tittle threw for dozens of touchdowns and thousands of yards, won a Most Valuable Player Award and was selected to seven Pro Bowls. But he endeared himself to New York not as a golden boy but as a muddied, grass-stained scrapper.

He was a balding field general with a fringe of gray who, at 34, in his old-fashioned high-topped shoes, had undeniably lost a step or two, but kept picking himself up off the ground to find a way to beat you, and New York cheered.

“For all Y. A.’s bumpkin ways, I suspect the city saw in him a reflection of itself,” the Giants star and broadcaster Frank Gifford remarked in his 1993 memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards.”