Baseball’s cinematic canon contains multitudes. Our national pastime has been contorted for all sorts of purposes over its time on the big screen: Roy Hobbs taking out a lighttower in The Natural, Benny the Jet stealing home in The Sandlot, Willie Mays Hayes’ dash around the bases at the end of Major League.
But as much as we may love them, the classics have never been particularly concerned with fealty to the rhythms of the game – not just how it works but how it feels both as player and spectator. They’re concerned with being … well, movies; capital-m Movies, first and foremost, using a streamlined and sanded-down version of the sport to drive toward climactic moments of heightened comedy or pathos. (Just to be clear: As someone who spent a portion of his adolescence conflating “quoting Bull Durham” with “having a personality”, this is hardly a criticism.)
But Eephus, a remarkable new film from director and co-writer Carson Lund, has no interest in streamlining anything. It takes its title from the eponymous pitch: long and looping, the ball floating toward home for what feels like a lifetime. The movie finds in that idea something of a metaphor: Rather than an inconvenience to be sped through, baseball’s peculiar, singular pace – its lulls, its nooks and crannies, its ability to seemingly stretch time toward its breaking point – is the whole idea, the conduit through which it allows both its characters and its audience access to a different way of moving through the world.
“What's really special about the game in the current world, I think,” Lund told Baseball Insiders, “is that, relative to the other major sports, it really has a sense of patience and its own unique rhythm that I think is at odds with most of the modern world.”
No baseball movie has ever embraced that rhythm quite like this, or better embodied the push and pull of being on the field or in the stands: hours that feel like minutes and minutes that feel like hours, tragedy and comedy in equal measure, and above all, one heck of a hangout.
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Eephus director Carson Lund talks baseball's unique 'time warp'
Set in the 1990s, the eve of the new millennium, the movie is built around one baseball game – one last baseball game, in fact – between two small-town Massachusetts recreational-league teams facing the imminent demolition of their field. There are no plucky underdogs here, no improbable last-minute schemes; the field is being turned into a school, and none of these largely middle-aged men are under the illusion that they could halt that process even if they wanted to.
Yet they show up anyway, determined to play nine more, even if they can’t quite articulate why – even if, indeed, they spend most of that time flailing around and feeling sore and giving each other grief like it’s any other weekend. Lund’s story isn’t about the future, or even about the past, at least not directly. We don’t know where these men – the players, an old scorekeeper named Franny, a pizza vendor played by Red Sox radio icon Joe Castiglione, a couple of skate rats beyond the outfield fence – have come from, and we don’t know where they’ll go once the sun goes down and the game ends. It’s instead about a very specific kind of present, a moment of play and striving and slapstick comedy that stands in contrast to a world that tugs our attention in a dizzying number of directions.
“One of the most valuable things movies can do … is to create a kind of time warp, or to make you feel time differently, and our allegiance to it and how we use it,” Lund said. “So many of us are beholden to these rigid routines that we've set up for ourselves. And that's fine; everybody needs a way to structure their day. But I think when we are too beholden to structure, we lose something of the serendipity and magic of life. I think baseball, at its best, can give you all of that.”
Like the sport itself, this is a movie with plenty of digressive space, less interested in plot than in soaking up every little moment that it can. The camera works in wide angles and the editing with a wonderfully light touch, both on the field – where we can see all the moving parts of a given play, and how each individual player responds to what’s asked of them, even if that’s only bracing for a pitch and then relaxing when it goes by – and in the dugout, where snippets of pitch-perfect dialogue ping around about everything from beer to strategy to a variety of petty grievances. Eephus understands that to be a love letter to this sport is to be in some sense not really about the sport at all, but instead about everything happening on its margins, a group of shaggy dudes finding an excuse to throw back Narragansetts under the fading fall sun.
Lund and his team, including co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, capture those margins with arresting intimacy. Every moment is keenly observed and deeply felt: the way one player stands with his glove on top of his head during a pause in the action, a throwaway gag in which another forgets that he’s up to bat and has to sprint to the plate while getting heckled from every angle, a baserunner bemoaning that there’s no one serving as third-base coach. If you’ve ever taken the field, at any level or any age, you’ll be able to close your eyes and cast yourself back there again.
That familiarity is crucial to the appeal of Eephus. Spending time with these teams and characters feels like spending time with people you know: the guy trying to relive the glory of his community college days, the guy who takes other people’s heckling a bit too seriously, the guy who just wants another beer. And they look like people you know, too; Lund has created a world populated by human beings who have never heard of Netflix face.
“I would only really bring people in that I had seen their headshot, and I thought that's a face that might exist in this world,” Lund said. “It's very dehumanizing, I think, to not see the kind of faces you see in your everyday life up there on screen … I love films from an earlier era, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, where people looked a little funky or a little strange and had wrinkles and creases and their face tells you something, that they've lived a life … We didn't have a makeup department on Eephus, because I wanted to celebrate those imperfections.”
But Lund wasn’t just casting for the right faces. He was casting for the right feel, to create the sense that you were watching people undertaking a long-standing ritual. That necessarily meant finding actors familiar with the sport, who may not have played beyond high school or even Little League but who still had its movements imprinted in their memories.
“Sometimes there was an actor I really loved, and I couldn't work with them because they hadn't really played much baseball,” Lund said. “I made sure that everyone at least cared about it and enjoyed it to some degree, and had played at some point in their life. Those early rehearsals were certainly illuminating, but we got on the field, and we did drills, and I was a coach, trying to refamiliarize them with these gestures.”
Other baseball movies try to turn the play on the field into high drama, like the chilly action of Moneyball or the hazy beauty of The Natural. Eephus is interested in something else, in the foibles and fuckups of a game played by regular people.
“There were many, many times where we would do 10, 20, 30 takes to try to get something right – and by right, I mean, it just had a certain grace to it, a certain je ne sais quoi," Lund said. "It wasn't, ‘Oh, that's perfect, they did it,’ right? It’s like, ‘Oh, that had a funny, graceful ballet of chaos and failure.’”
That wasn’t the hyper-competitive version of the sport that Lund knew as a talented player in his youth. But it’s the version he’s reconnected with as an adult playing in his own rec league in L.A., something softer and gentler and more spacious.
“It's a game of nature with a lot of space and breath and distance between people, and that's very liberating to me,” Lund said. “It was maybe one of the last bastions of that kind of sustained attention … I've always been a fan of slow cinema and movies that really make me rethink my relationship to the screen and to narrative structure and movies that show you … the plot is only one minor part of this, and the wind in the trees is also another part, and sometimes watching that is as important or more important.”
And while that vision may be a bit anachronistic in 2025, it’s something the movie makes clear that we’d profoundly miss if it’s gone. It’s also why Lund isn’t a fan of the pace of play changes that have reshaped baseball at the Major League level in recent years – like the ghost runner, which he pejoratively referred to as “an attempt to just finish the game”. That notion – to get this over with so we can get back to our jobs, our responsibilities, our daily lives – is one fundamentally at odds with the spirit of a sport that offers the possibility of an endless afternoon.
The players in Eephus are desperate to realize that possibility, to play against the dying of the light. For most of the game within the film, they’re met with varying degrees of failure: ground balls that get away, pitches that lose the strike zone, knees that ache. But those failures take place in a world apart, on green grass under blue sky. And they also bring with them the opportunity, however remote, for transcendence: At one point in the middle innings, a player connects for a home run, and his swing is rendered in glorious slow motion, bathed in golden light.
Of course, that moment proves all too fleeting. The game, like everything else, must eventually end; as Lund puts it, “time is always passing … we’re going to lose the light, and it’s going to get too late, and we’re going to have to go to bed”, alarms set for the next morning. And as it does, the real world encroaches in increasingly unsettling ways, bonds beginning to fray at the edges. Eephus leaves us with a kind of elegy, sentiment lurking just under the surface of its characters’ sarcasm, for a sport and a space that gives us all some room to breathe.
“It’s kinda like baseball,” a pitcher named Merritt Nettles says of his signature eephus. “I’m looking around for something to happen – poof, the game’s over.”