<em>Eephus</em> Is an Ode to the Beauty of Baseball

An eephus pitch is one of baseball’s many pieces of niche ephemera. It’s a weird trick throw that’s barely ever glimpsed in the professional game—an arcing lob of the ball, traveling at half the speed or less than a normal pitch; it exists only to catch batters off guard. In the director Carson Lund’s beguiling debut film, also called Eephus, a player named Merritt Nettles (played by Nate Fisher) specializes in tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen—poof, the game’s over.”

If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you may not be the movie’s intended audience. But to me, these details are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball’s eternal appeal, even as the sport weathers the passage of time. Set during the 1990s in Massachusetts, it follows the last recreational-league matchup between two groups of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball enthusiasts; they’re clashing once more before a planned development will pave over the site. Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.

The film begins with the league’s sole enthusiast, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass with his portable card table, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the players begin to dribble onto the field. In red are the members of a team called Adler’s Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The history between the two squads is irrelevant, and there’s barely any information to glean from their overheard dialogue. Instead, Lund (who also co-wrote the film’s script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels in the minor details, such as the players’ many forms of inventive facial hair and their cute little practice rituals. The drama that does arise feels minor, too, such as a brief moment of panic when the Riverdogs realize that their ninth player hasn’t shown up yet, which would force them to forfeit.

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Otherwise, Eephus’s story never goes anywhere. Even though it’s clear that at least some of the actors know how to play the game, there isn’t much intense activity to take in. Over and over, the viewer sees shots of players briefly crouching in anticipation of something happening (namely, the delivery of a pitch to a batter), then relaxing when it doesn’t. That’s the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional chance for real action.

In lieu of narrative progression, Lund is singularly intent on generating an atmosphere that makes the viewer feel like they’re perched in the bleachers. The perfectly calibrated sound design contributes to this heavily; it is expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard more distinctly than the yelled instructions or friendly banter from base runners. The director’s attentive scene-setting helps transform Eephus into a dispatch from another era—a memory bouncing through the decades to somehow reach theaters today.

The throwback vibe is further cultivated by the cast, which comes across like a cheerfully old-school collection of performers. Among them is the Boston Red Sox alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, one of Major League Baseball’s best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch back in the 1970s, who appears in a cameo role. The rest of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, look like they could have walked onto the set through a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall those of the players from Lee’s era. The renowned 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman also joins to dispense pearls of wisdom in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings.

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Looking backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I mean this in the warmest manner possible. The game is like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American tradition that, in my opinion, needs little in the way of reinvention. Still, although Lund isn’t going for any major tear-jerking moments, his movie invokes the melancholy sense of something important passing into the mists. None of the characters is able to use a smartphone or check social media, given the period setting, but the couple of kids sitting in the stands observe the amateur teams’ particular brand of fun as if it’s from the Stone Age.

Lund cited the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as an inspiration for Eephus. The comparison is apt on a surface level; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a famous example of “slow cinema” set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not unlike an aging ballpark. The film discursively follows some of the picture house’s regulars as they attend its last showtime. Beyond their similar presentations, it’s also Eephus’s kindred spirit thematically: Each one is a quirky ode to a particular hobby that is still extant in our life, albeit becoming something of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a beautiful portrait of a specific pastime. It’s also, delightfully, a low-stakes hang with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—much like baseball itself.