“Eephus,” at the M.V. Film Center starting April 4, is a quiet feature by Carson Lund. It is ostensibly about a game in the mid-1990s between two New England recreational teams, which face off for one last time before their beloved Soldiers Field is taken over for the construction of a new middle school.
We open with players slowly filing in on a late autumn Sunday morning as the local radio announces small-town events, situating us in a bygone era. The leaves are turning, and the sun’s warmth shines down. There is camaraderie among the men rather than rivalry. They are a scrappy bunch, including many middle-agers. While unable to run as fast as they did in their youth, they play with heart and a vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops. Similarly, a couple of longtime observers, girlfriends, kids, and teenage troublemakers flit in and out throughout the day.
Lund, in fact, concentrates on the minutiae of all these momentary interactions rather than any athletic prowess, thereby shifting the narrative away from the game’s outcome to a sense of community. As the long day slides into night and innings bleed together, the players confront the uncertainty of a new era in their lives, unanchored from their teammates who are, in some sense, family. Lund writes in his director’s statement: “The film is less about the particular game being played than about the possibilities opened up by the game: of escape, of camaraderie, and of a deeper, more serene sense of time passing than what’s capable in the grind of a workweek.”
The film’s title refers to a unique pitch, which one of the characters describes at length: “Eephus [eeph·us] is thrown so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter. He swings too early or too late … Your elbow stays in the same place as you would for your curve ball, and you tell the batter with your hips that you’re throwing hard … You can tell when it’s an eephus. It stays in the air forever.” The film, too, unfolds like the special pitch. It is languorously slow, and we can’t quite pin it down.
Lund explains his connection to baseball and the themes he mines in the film: “After junior year of high school, I abandoned my lifelong commitment to baseball in favor of filmmaking. A decade later, having relocated to the yearlong sunny skies of Los Angeles, I joined a recreational league, at which point I developed a deeper understanding of why I fled the game and what attracted me to it. I realized that a baseball field can represent so many different things at different points of life relative to where one is at in their personal development.”
He continues, “A field at age 14 is often a stage, a place to display one’s toughness and perceived superiority, while at age 30, in the context of a deteriorating body and a more solidified personal life, it becomes a ritualistic space for reflection and leisure. Playing nonprofessional baseball as an adult is pure excess, the kind of extracurricular activity that our modern world often leaves no room for, but which is nonetheless capable of eliciting the kind of unadulterated joy and fellow feeling that are essential to humanity. ‘Eephus’ is ultimately a celebration of this fact.”
“Eephus” screens at the M.V. Film Center starting April 4. For tickets, visit mvfilmsociety.com/2025/03/eephus.
