EEPHUS - Mark Reviews Movies

Eephus, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2025

Whatever one thinks of baseball as a sport, it has become quite the source of a bounty of metaphors. Co-writer/director Carson Lund's Eephus, which follows a single game from beginning to end, gives us its own allegorical take as two characters discuss the eponymous pitch.

It's a slow throw, to say the least, that's meant to throw a batter off guard. The hitter becomes bored watching it, the relief pitcher for one of the teams explains, and indeed, the pitcher himself gets bored watching the ball, as it takes a high and long arc toward home plate. The player hearing the explanation points out that it's a lot like baseball—just waiting around for something to happen and, before you even know it, the game's finished. Some of us listening to the conversation might have another thought to add: That sounds a bit like life, too.

That description, though, is very much like this funny and achingly melancholy film, which is entirely about baseball. It's about the sport, however, in a way that can be equally appreciated by those who know the ins and outs of the sport in agonizing detail and those, like some of the stray people who watch the game at the center of the story, who have no clue what's happening on the field.

There are key moments here when even the players themselves, some of whom are as invested in this particular game as anyone has ever been in a ballgame, have no idea what is happening or has happened. After night falls on the matchup, one player hits the ball straight into the air, and as the fielding team just stares upward in the general vicinity of the hit, nobody can figure where the ball has gone or even can hear where it might have landed.

It's one absurd but completely believable touch in a film that is, at its core, believable in just how absurd this game does become. The stakes of the matchup itself are pretty low, as the de facto home team Adler's Paint faces off against the Riverdogs. The winners aren't moving on to any kind of tournament or improving their seasonal standings, because this is just a recreational league for men of various ages somewhere in New England.

A couple of the players show some natural talent and could have been or could still pursue becoming professional at some level. Most of them are just working-class guys, playing a game they've loved for their entire lives each Sunday when it's baseball season. A few of them, especially the men who have been unceremoniously placed in right field, barely seem capable of doing much, but what does it matter? Everyone's here for the game, and that's all that counts.

The only reason this specific game matters to these men is because it's the last one that'll be played on this field. A school will be built atop it in the coming months, and after decades of kids and teens and grown-ups of several generations practicing and playing around and having match-ups here, Soldiers Field will only become a memory, before it's inevitably forgotten.

That's why this game matters to the players of Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs, who will spend a bright morning, a crisp afternoon, and a cold, dark evening playing baseball. They will play no matter how badly their bodies ache, how long their families wait at home for them, how much beer at least one of them consumes after taking a hit to the gut, and how pointless the game starts to feel after nobody can score a run. They will play after the umpires leave, after they have to start searching for balls in the nearby woods, and after the sun sets. They will play because they have to—because there will never be another game at this place that has meant so much to them over the years.

That's both the source of humor and the mounting sense of sorrow in Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher's screenplay, which is more about its characters, its exacting tone, and its ability to find poignancy in the ordinary than baseball. We're introduced to and, to various degrees, get to know the 20 players on both teams, such as Ed (Keith William Richards), the pitcher and team captain, and John (John R. Smith Jr.), the curt but dedicated catcher, on the Adler's Paint club, as well as Graham (Stephen Radochia), the captain and third-baseman, and Logan (Patrick Garrigan), a younger centerfielder who could have an actual career in the sport, and Bill (Russ Gannon), the guy at second who desperately wants his kids to see him hit a ball, for the Riverdogs.

Graham, by the way, owns the construction company that will be building the new school, and obviously, there's some animosity toward him on account of that. It only comes through a lot of passive-aggressive comments, though. What else could they do? They have all resigned themselves to the inevitable, and there's some blunt truth in that characteristic that extends beyond this final game. We may not get to know each and every player in great depth (One seemingly key character suddenly leaves mid-game, never to be seen or heard about again, for example), but we believe every moment we get from each one.

The game goes on and on—and on and on some more. People watch from the bleachers and depart when they've had enough. A mysterious man named Lee (former baseball pro Bill "Spaceman" Lee) shows up out of the woods and can barely hide how much he wants to throw the ball one more time, the lineups shift as absence, exhaustion, and for Riverdogs pitcher Troy (David Pridemore), drunkenness require.

The heart of the game and, perhaps, the film itself, though, belongs to Franny (Cliff Blake), who sits with a fine view of home plate and, as he has done for years or decades at this point, keeps score—before being enlisted to serve as umpire. His slightly defeated but utterly determined statement, "I'm trying," might as well be the rallying cry of Eephus. It is, after all, the best any of us can do in the face of life or something just as important—like one final baseball game with friends.

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