‘Eephus’: A Low-Key Nostalgia Movie About a Low-Key Ballgame a Long Time Ago

It’s really appropriate that I saw ‘Eephus’, a shaggy, low-key indie baseball movie at a “Mystery” screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. I wandered in, took my seat, ordered my free M&M’s from a coupon that had been hanging around since my birthday earlier this month, the movie began, and I found myself hanging out with a bunch of out-of-shape Massholes in the 1990s as they prepared to play America’s pastime in the most mediocre way possible.

EEPHUS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Carson Lund
Written by: Carson Lund, Michael Basta, Nate Fisher
Starring: Frederick Wiseman, Bill Lee, Keith William Richards, Cliff Blake
Running time: 99 mins

‘Eephus’ is a movie without stars, and without melodrama. The plot, such as it is, involves a decrepit small-town Massachusetts ball field hosting one last game between two local amateur teams before the city tears it down to build a new elementary school. The fact that it’s an elementary school and not an office tower or even a shopping center shows you how parochial the concerns are. But to these guys, this field means something, even if that something means losing a place where they can drink beer and casually play the game of their boyhood.

They don’t play particularly well; many of these guys are very overweight. You can feel the aches and pains as they try to run the bases and slide. But they’re also not totally incompetent. Balls don’t go through their legs. The pitchers can find the strike zone. There’s even a home run, a real one, not some sort of inside-the-park Little League job. The game looks and feels like baseball if you and I had a chance to play it one more time.

Writer-director Carson Lund, in his first film, has created a fictional world that resembles that of a classic observational documentary like the ones directed by Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles Brothers. It’s no accident that Wiseman’s croaky voice appears on the radio periodically. We watch these guys chugging brews on the sidelines and munching sunflower seeds. If any of them have names, they pass by quickly. We don’t learn what a single one of them does for a living. One guy has a family, we know, because his kids are watching the game until the sun starts to go down and they get cold. Mom takes them away and the daughter sweetly says “bye, dad, we’ll save you a baked potato!”

‘Eephus’ exudes a vibe of existential nostalgia for years gone by, for a world without cell phones or partisan insanity, when regular guys could be regular guys. The closest thing the movie gets to a thesis statement comes when one of the younger characters describes the movie’s namesake Eephus pitch, “a type of curve ball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter–makes us lose track of time.” Like the guys in the movie, you definitely lose track of time in Eephus. Characters wander in and out of the frame, and disappear as suddenly as they appear. Someone who seems like the main character, a gruff team player/manager (Keith William Richards), gets into a car in the middle of the fifth inning because he has to attend his “niece’s christening,” and then drives away. No one mentions him again.

The only “name” in the Eephus cast is Bill “Spaceman” Lee, an eccentric former Red Sox relief pitcher who guys like me, who collected baseball cards in the 70s and 80s, vaguely remember from the era when weirdoes on the mound talked to baseballs and spouted post-stoner philosophy. In an anti-Shoeless Joe from ‘Field of Dreams’ move, he wanders out of the woods when one team’s pitcher gets too drunk to continue, throws a scoreless inning, complete with Eephus pitch, while wearing a lemon-yellow Polo shirt, and then vanishes. No one mentions him again. And the player who gives us the Eephus philosophy never actually delivers an Eephus pitch.

The movie’s heart and soul is a gummy old-timer named Franny, who is the only person who stays to watch the entire game, while keeping score. When the umpires go home, Franny takes over umpiring duties as well. We learn that Franny has attended all these sandlot games. The man just loves baseball, even when it’s baseball where the players have to use their car headlights to illuminate the field at night. And when it’s all over, Franny also disappears into the woods.

The next morning, it was Opening Day for Major League Baseball. I watched as the Dodgers played the Cubs before a sold-out crowd, which had paid a minimum of $3000 a seat at the Tokyo Dome, the largest baseball stadium in the largest city in the world. It was baseball at the highest level, starring Shohei Ohtani, the closest thing we have to a deity walking the Earth. It was baseball to admire, but ‘Eephus’ represents the kind of baseball we could actually play. A team wins, but no one really wins. No one is The Natural. It’s funny, but not “Wild Thing” Major League funny. There are no angels in the outfield; the outfielders can barely see the ball. The movie passed like a mystery, like life, and then, mysteriously, it was over.