As explained by one of the characters, Eephus is the name of a baseball pitch so slow it mesmerizes the batter such that he is either too late or too early when he swings.
This quirky, meditative, and maybe too low-key gem of a comedy feels like the pitch, a nice, floating firefly you enjoy even as it flummoxes you. The story depicts the last baseball game on “Soldiers Field,” a ratty Massachusetts park soon giving way to construction of a school and ending the years-long tradition of a bunch of townies. Their skills, conditioning, and waistlines are vastly disparate, but they are drawn to the place once a week likes moths to flames. They carry both the wizened irony of knowing they suck, but also, maybe not. The inconsistent fire in their belly is one of many charms of this languorous debut.
Co-Writer and director Carson Lund presents the ballfield as church and purgatory, both hallowed and emblematic of some kind of crappy, interminable penance. The players are of all walks and skills, running the gamut from the super competitive to easy lopers to ex-jocks with nothing better to do but try and catch an old spark. Some come solely to get out of the house for minimal exercise while draining Narragansetts. They have the same arguments, bits, and chatter they’ve been having for years, and the demise of their weekly tradition seems half mournful and half relief.
There are no great stakes, no “let’s get this out in the open” showdowns, just a few flaccid tiffs. It is implied that the manager of one of the teams may have a tangential connection to the closing of the field, yet there is no overt confrontation. It’s just a bunch of dudes in uniforms giving varying effort to passing the time.
Thankfully, Lund is none too fond of the elegiac baseball-as-metaphor for life story and even slyly makes fun of Field of Dreams as people just seem to wander on and off the field as from a mist, be they stoners, kids, strangers, or even a former weird pitcher from the Red Sox.
I have been playing basketball with the same group of guys on an elementary school court since around 2000, over a quarter of a century. As one of the, if not currently the oldest participants, I’ve seen a lot of players come and go. My skills – never formidable to begin with – have diminished such that every 6 months, when the time comes to re-up, I contemplate retirement like the smart older players before me, and like the characters in Lund’s movie. Such is my tenure, they call me “the Commish.” Rhetorically, at least, I have been relegated to a desk job.
Every time I think about leaving, if not quite on top, on my own terms, sans a ruptured Achilles or torn ligament, I realize that those terms are non-negotiably, “I will go down with the ship.” This is not good news for the others, who are better and who likely sigh when I am assigned to their squad. But you know what? Fuck them. For all my handicaps, a good night on the court on the verge of 62 is simply too sweet an elixir to voluntarily forego. Last week, 5 of us, undersized in each matchup by an average of 3-4 inches, took the last three games. I felt like a member of the ’80 Olympics hockey team. This week, I turned an ankle on someone’s foot, hit the deck in the lane, and caught a driving knee to the back of my head. Later, I caught a slap to the front. All fine, but I also singlehandedly lost 2 games with turnovers, bricks, and very bad decisions. To make matters worse, I celebrated a win with a fist pump when, in fact, we merely tied the game, which we then lost when I decided to switch off my man, who hit the game winner. I felt sick.
So, the film spoke to me in a manner that probably warrants recusal.
But you know what? Fuck that.
On Amazon Prime, for free.
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