Eephus is a film about an amateur baseball game played languidly over several hours at Soldiers Field, a treasured old baseball field in small town Massachusetts. The film is named for a unique, rarely used pitch. And the game is the plot. But it’s a special game, because it’s the last time these two ragtag recreational teams will play on the field. The county board has voted to build a new middle school there.
Most of the players are aging and in various stages of fitness. Their mismatched uniforms are blues for the River Dogs and reds for the Adler’s Paint team. These men have been playing this beloved game at Soldiers Field for years.
The film is set in the 1990s, before digital took over our world. Eephus is in the tradition of the “hangout” film, celebrating community and camaraderie rather than baseball minutiae. Yes, it’s a film for baseball fans but it’s also for film fans who will enjoy a story of life played at a slower speed than today.
Director Carson Lund, in his feature film debut, illustrates why baseball, once considered the national pastime, has been overtaken by faster-moving action. Lund and his co-writers, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, lace their script with lively and natural dialogue. “Hey, the strike zone is home plate, not first base,” an infielder hollers at the pitcher early in the game. And there’s plenty of smartass chatter and beer-drinking in the dugout.
Not much besides baseball happens in Eephus. We don’t learn about the players’ personal lives—except when the Adler pitcher’s brother drives by to demand he leave the game to attend his niece's christening. And so pitcher/coach Ed (Keith William Richards) takes off his hat and climbs into the car to meet his family obligation.
But the game is beset by other problems.
The umpires decide they can’t ump any longer. Wives waiting at home, etc. “You can’t even wait for the stretch?” one player hollers at them. Yes, it’s the top of the seventh inning, the score is 4-4 and the umps leave. Franny (Cliff Blake), the official scorekeeper, sits behind the foul line, annotating the play-by-play in his scorebook with a pencil stub. He’s sitting on a beach chair, a TV table for his desk.
“Hey, Franny, can you ump?”
“Not well, but I can do it,” Franny agrees.
The game continues, the score becomes 5-4, then 5-5, and it’s getting darker and darker. The ump can’t call balls and strikes because he can’t see the ball—or the plate. Finally, someone comes up with a practical solution for lighting and the game goes on—through nine innings to a 6-5 conclusion.
Eephus is sort of a shaggy dog movie. The action goes on and on, just as a baseball game does. (It’s the only sport, until recently when a pitch clock was added to MLB games, not confined by time, only by scoring three outs per inning for nine innings.) Like the shaggy dog story that goes on too long, an eephus pitch seems to never land. An eephus pitch arcs way up slowly and curves way down, very, very slowly, so slowly that the batter might be confused about where the ball is going. (Players talk about an eephus pitch but we never actually see one in the movie.) Eephus could have been a book by W.P. Kinsella, who wrote Shoeless Joe, adapted the film Field of Dreams, and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, a novel about a Chicago Cubs exhibition game that lasts more than 2,000 innings.
A few names of film and baseball lore appear in the film. The great documentarian, Frederick Wiseman, is the voice of the local radio station. Joe Castiglione, the retired Boston Red Sox announcer, plays the pizza truck owner. Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a former major league pitcher who occasionally threw the eephus, ambles on to the field and volunteers to fill in for the exhausted River Dogs pitcher.
“I’ll get you three outs,” he guarantees. And he does.
Eephus opens March 21 at the Music Box Theatre
If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting Third Coast Review’s arts and culture coverage by making a donation. Choose the amount that works best for you, and know it goes directly to support our writers and contributors.