Eephus - Baseball Movie in THEATERS

And it's about time.

The passage of time and how we mark it is at the center of a new baseball movie (NOW IN THEATERS!), Eephus.

I always want to add an exclamation point to that title, even though the film’s marketing does not. EEPHUS! sounds like an onomatopoeia, but it’s the opposite. An ephus is a seldom used pitch, thrown with such a high arc that it deceives the batter. It’s so slow it makes no sound at all. This is not a movie about EEPHING, which does make a sound, a delightful sound.

Back to the movie. TIME as a concept is displayed and considered through a single men’s league baseball game, the last ever on a neighborhood field. The local municipality is building a school there. That’s a fun irony by the film’s writers, as this is the opposite of most MLB cities, that finance billion-dollar stadiums for billionaires with billions of tax dollars, often at the cost of supporting public education.

Baseball is the perfect activity for this meditation. “Too Slow” or “downright boring” say the detractors. “You just don’t understand the nuance” say the… tractors. Discussions of time and how it passes are rife in baseball. Add your pitch clock hot takes in the comments if you like.

Director Carson Lund spoke after the screening I saw. He talked about the first cut of this film— it was over 2 hours and not getting any traction. He and his co-scriptwriters had meticulously plotted the action of the game, batter by batter, every hit, out, and run accounted for. They created a box score for their script. But once they got into the edit, all that detail was unnecessary. In the watching of the film, the audience is cursorily made aware of the score, and the players are there to compete. The constant trash-talking attests to this. When we do see baseball action, it’s crisp, precise, and exciting. But for the audience and the players, the score doesn’t really matter (until it does). The enjoyment is being there, with these guys, doing this thing.

When it comes to stories of any kind, movies or series, I love PLOT. Keep things moving. The original sin of storytelling is: do not bore me. Then again, I also love a good “hang out” movie, where the enjoyment is the vibe, the character, the setting, the situation. Lost in Translation (2003) is on the Mount Rushmore of hang out movies. Nobody plays lethargic sleepy like Bill Murray. You look at his face just drooping there and feel everything he’s feeling. He’s charming and flawed and you don’t want to stop hanging out when he goes to the airport.

Eephus pursues the same feeling. It’s on the poster. In Lund’s trimming of the film— from telling and showing everything to paring it down to its bare essence— Eephus progresses spritely, but never feels rushed. This pacing, the cinematography, and the evocative use of surround sound, places the audience in the game, on the bench, and in the batter’s box. We’re just gonna hang out with our dudes for the next hour and thirty-five minutes. And that’s cool, man.

Maybe this is a theme of most baseball movies, but Eephus especially brings out thoughts of masculinity and how men interact with each other and with their own emotions. I’m reminded of a Rick and Morty gag (season 1, ep. 7 “Raising Gazorpazorp”), where Rick and Morty’s sister Summer go to a planet run by women. The women greet each other with “I am here if you need to talk.” The phrase is repeated again and again. The baseball players in Eephus are Earth men. They greet each other with insults, baseball clichés, and fist bumps, but the sentiment is the same. “I’m here to play baseball with you if you need to play baseball.”

Who doesn’t need that?