ElRoy Face is dead at 97. He was the original specialist. Before we had "disruptors" in Silicon Valley hoodies, we had guys like Face who figured out how to break a system using nothing but two fingers and a stubborn refusal to go away.

He was the Pittsburgh Pirates’ secret weapon, the ace forkballer who essentially invented the concept of the modern closer. But don’t call him a "closer" to his face, or whatever remains of his legacy. Back then, they called them "firemen." It’s a better word. It implies an emergency. It implies that everything was already burning when you got there.

Face didn’t look like an athlete. He was five-foot-eight and weighed about as much as a wet tracksuit. In today’s MLB, where every pitcher is a six-foot-five biomechanical lab experiment throwing 102 mph until their ulnar collateral ligament snaps like a dry twig, Face would be an anomaly. A bug in the code. He didn’t have the heat. He had the forkball.

The forkball is a nasty, antisocial pitch. You jam the ball between your index and middle fingers, killing the spin. It comes at the plate looking like a standard fastball, then hits a wall and falls off a cliff. It’s the baseball equivalent of a 404 error. The batter swings at air because the ball simply isn't where the physics suggested it should be. It was low-tech deception at its finest.

Let’s talk about 1959. That’s the year Face broke the math. He went 18-1 as a reliever. That shouldn’t happen. In any era, in any league, that is a statistical glitch. Modern analytics junkies—the guys who spend their lives staring at Expected Weighted On-Base Average—would look at those numbers and start sweating. They’d call it "unsustainable." They’d talk about "regression to the mean." But Face didn't care about the mean. He just kept coming out of the bullpen and winning games he had no business winning.

He was the ultimate efficiency hack. In 1959, he didn't start a single game. He just finished them. He was a specialist at a time when the "starter" was still the king of the mountain. The trade-off was simple: you give up the glory of the opening pitch for the cold-blooded utility of the final out. He was the first guy to prove that you could dominate a game by only playing the last twenty minutes of it.

There’s a specific kind of friction in being the guy who saves the day. You don't get the buildup. You don't get the rhythm. You get dropped into a high-leverage mess with runners on base and the crowd screaming for blood. It’s high-stress, low-margin work. It’s like being the sysadmin called in at 3:00 AM because the servers are melting. No one thanks you for the uptime; they just blame you for the downtime.

Face made $40,000 at his peak. That’s the price of a mid-range sedan today. For that, he gave the Pirates 15 years and a World Series ring in 1960. He pitched in three games of that series against the Yankees, including the legendary Game 7. He didn't get the win—that went to Bill Mazeroski and his walk-off homer—but Face was the one who kept the game from turning into a blowout before the heroics could happen. He was the infrastructure. The boring, reliable pipes that keep the water running while the architect takes the credit.

We live in a world obsessed with optimization now. We have wearable tech that measures a pitcher’s sleep quality and cameras that track the exact horizontal break of every slider. We’ve turned the grit of the game into a spreadsheet. And yet, for all our data, we still can’t replicate what Face did. We have closers today who cost $20 million a year and can’t go more than one inning without needing a week of rest and a massage. Face would pitch three or four innings at a time, three days in a row. He was analog. He was built for a different duty cycle.

He lived to 97, outlasting the stadium where he made his name and most of the hitters he embarrassed. There’s something to be said for that kind of longevity. It suggests that the forkball—that weird, plunging, low-impact delivery—wasn't just a way to win games. It was a way to survive.

Now that he’s gone, we’ll probably see a few tributes about the "golden age" of the game. We’ll hear about how things were simpler back then. They weren't. They were just less documented. ElRoy Face wasn't a relic; he was a precursor. He was the first guy to realize that in a world of generalists, the man with the one weird trick is king.

If we tried to build a pitcher like ElRoy Face in a lab today, the scouts would laugh him out of the room for his stature and the analytics department would flag his fly-ball rate. Is the game actually better now that we’ve optimized all the weirdness out of it?