An eephus pitch is one among baseball’s many items of area of interest ephemera. It’s a bizarre trick throw that’s barely ever glimpsed within the skilled sport—an arcing lob of the ball, touring at half the velocity or lower than a traditional pitch; it exists solely to catch batters off guard. Within the director Carson Lund’s beguiling debut movie, additionally referred to as Eephus, a participant named Merritt Nettles (performed by Nate Fisher) focuses on tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m wanting round for one thing to occur—poof, the sport’s over.”
If the earlier paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you is probably not the film’s supposed viewers. However to me, these particulars are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball’s everlasting attraction, whilst the game weathers the passage of time. Set throughout the Nineties in Massachusetts, it follows the final recreational-league matchup between two teams of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball fanatics; they’re clashing as soon as extra earlier than a deliberate improvement will pave over the positioning. Eephus is an elegy, however with simply the barest trace of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that concurrently cares deeply about America’s pastime.
The movie begins with the league’s sole fanatic, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass along with his transportable card desk, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the gamers start to dribble onto the sphere. In pink are the members of a workforce referred to as Adler’s Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The historical past between the 2 squads is irrelevant, and there’s barely any info to glean from their overheard dialogue. As a substitute, Lund (who additionally co-wrote the movie’s script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels within the minor particulars, such because the gamers’ many types of creative facial hair and their cute little observe rituals. The drama that does come up feels minor, too, comparable to a quick second of panic when the Riverdogs notice that their ninth participant hasn’t proven up but, which might pressure them to forfeit.
In any other case, Eephus’s story by no means goes anyplace. Regardless that it’s clear that not less than a number of the actors know how you can play the sport, there isn’t a lot intense exercise to absorb. Time and again, the viewer sees photographs of gamers briefly crouching in anticipation of one thing taking place (particularly, the supply of a pitch to a batter), then enjoyable when it doesn’t. That’s the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional probability for actual motion.
In lieu of narrative development, Lund is singularly intent on producing an environment that makes the viewer really feel like they’re perched within the bleachers. The superbly calibrated sound design contributes to this closely; it’s expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard extra distinctly than the yelled directions or pleasant banter from base runners. The director’s attentive scene-setting helps rework Eephus right into a dispatch from one other period—a reminiscence bouncing by way of the many years to one way or the other attain theaters at this time.
The throwback vibe is additional cultivated by the forged, which comes throughout like a cheerfully old-school assortment of performers. Amongst them is the Boston Crimson Sox alum Invoice “Spaceman” Lee, one among Main League Baseball’s best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch again within the Seventies, who seems in a cameo position. The remainder of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, appear like they may have walked onto the set by way of a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall these of the gamers from Lee’s period. The famend 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman additionally joins to dispense pearls of knowledge in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings.
Wanting backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I imply this within the warmest method doable. The sport is just like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American custom that, for my part, wants little in the way in which of reinvention. Nonetheless, though Lund isn’t going for any main tear-jerking moments, his film invokes the melancholy sense of one thing necessary passing into the mists. Not one of the characters is ready to use a smartphone or test social media, given the interval setting, however the couple of children sitting within the stands observe the newbie groups’ explicit model of enjoyable 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 comparability is apt on a floor degree; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a well-known instance of “sluggish cinema” set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not in contrast to an getting older ballpark. The movie discursively follows a number of the image home’s regulars as they attend its final showtime. Past their comparable displays, it’s additionally Eephus’s kindred spirit thematically: Each is a unusual ode to a specific passion that’s nonetheless extant in our life, albeit turning into one thing of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a phenomenal portrait of a particular pastime. It’s additionally, delightfully, a low-stakes hold with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—very similar to baseball itself.
