Eephus (2025)
Baseball movies used to be a reliable staple in Hollywood. Many of them have been either quite good or at least entertaining. But—to use a baseball analogy—as more studio heads became uninterested in hitting singles and doubles at the box office and only interested in franchise-creating home runs (combined with many moviegoers' refusal to leave their couches), baseball movies have joined comedies in the studio rubbish bin. In this atmosphere, first-time writer-director Carson Lund's Eephus is a breath of fresh air, not just because it's a new baseball movie, but because it's an affecting look at the passage of time and the toll it takes on everyone.
The movie gets its title from an
exceptionally slow pitch with an almost rainbow-like trajectory. The story is
set in a small New England town in the 1990s. Two adult rec league baseball
teams are meeting for one last game on their community field before a school is
built on it.
For most of the men, this means the end
of their amateur baseball careers—the nearest field is an inconvenient drive
away and has maintenance issues. A few of the men are still fairly young, but
the majority are middle-aged with bodies that are breaking down. The long drive
won't be worth it to them; they've known deep down their time was ending, and
their field closure is the final straw.
It's not just the field that seems like
it's on its last legs; it's baseball itself. As stated, most of the players
here are middle-aged. The men playing soccer on a neighboring field are much
younger. Skateboarders stop by and heckle the baseball players. The children of
one of the players show up because they love their dad but aren't particularly
interested in the game itself.
There isn't a main character in Eephus
nor is there a conventional plot. The movie follows the men (and a few
spectators who come and go) during the course of their final game. None of the
actors are name actors. The most well-known members of the cast would be 1970s
Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, who appears as an old man who pops in for an inning;
the actor (Keith William Richards) who played the bookie's murderous henchman
in Adam Sandler's Uncut Gems; and documentary legend Frederick Wiseman,
who provides a voiceover. The movie most resembles the ensemble comedies of
directors Robert Altman and Richard Linklater (who, coincidentally, made the
last good baseball movie with 2016's Everybody Wants Some).
Eephus works because it
understands, as many lifelong sports fans do, that sports can be a metaphor for
life. The men aren't mushy or sentimental about baseball. They know they've
lost a step. They often get on each other's nerves. They know the end result of
their game will ultimately not make any difference on their lives. It's not
even a league championship; it's just one last game. But they do it anyway—just
as people toil on with their lives into middle age, even though they know their
childhood dreams aren't going to come true and even though the passage of time
brings loss and pain. The men in Eephus aren't exactly raging against
the dying of the light; they're more grumbling and trudging against it. However,
their struggle is a universal, human one.
The tone of Eephus is a
bittersweet, humorous one. Viewers don't need to be baseball fans or former
adult rec league players to enjoy it. That said, as someone who played adult
rec league sports until his knees betrayed him, the portrayal of rec league
dynamics rang completely true to this reviewer.
Eephus is currently playing only
at the Broad Theater. It was made by a small indie distributor (Music Box
Films) so it won't get any marketing campaign, but it's worth discovering. It's
a gem.
