On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way for a new school. They are what you call “rec” teams, short for recreational, that play for fun and allow any local adult male to join who wants to be a part. The two teams in this game are Atlas Paint, in red, and The Riverdogs, in blue. The members range from young former college players to middle age and older: some good, some out of shape. It’s a movie from first-time director Carson Lund that covers the length of this often sloppy contest, and the title is Eephus.
Eephus, as one of the Atlas pitchers explains fairly early in the film, is an old-fashioned slang term for a slow lazy curveball that comes down at the hitter in such a way as to fool him into swinging too late. It’s a weird funny name that is somehow perfect for this picture, which found me quietly smiling and chuckling throughout its running time.
In this hour and a half film we meet over 25 characters, none of them known that well, but enough to convey the collective atmosphere on the field. First there’s the elderly score keeper Franny, played by Cliff Blake, who pays unwavering attention to his job while interjecting various amusing quotes by famous Major League ballplayers. And there’s a gruff umpire in a genuine umpire outfit who says he has to leave at a certain hour whether or not the game is over. The blue team is short a man, and the ump threatens to call a forfeit until they can field nine. Fortunately, the ninth member, the catcher, shows up at the last minute. The Riverdogs pitcher, a short scruffy middle-aged guy with an elaborate delivery, drinks beer during the game (which he’s not supposed to do) and later says he’s too tired to continue, but is argued out of it by the player-manager who is determined to finish the game even when it starts to get dark. The Atlas team has its own share of characters, including an irascible manager and pitcher, played by Keith William Richards, who suddenly has to leave because his brother shows up in a car screaming at him that he’s late for his niece’s christening.
The movie is consistently funny because of its screenplay, written by Lund with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher. The characters are surly and profane, constantly teasing and insulting each other. One man has some screaming temper tantrums when he disagrees with various calls. All the talk is contained in short, pithy exchanges, on the field and in the dugout, between the actual plays, which Lund often films eccentrically, not injecting drama into it but giving it a casual feel like an actual game of that kind. A couple of teens make wisecracks from the sidelines, and one of the players’ kids asks another, “Why do they care so much? Don’t they have more important things going on?”
There are lots of little details about baseball mentioned off-hand. It helps to have some familiarity with the game, I suppose, but it’s not essential. Gradually, without a trace of sentimentality, and in the midst of this quietly hilarious story, we get a sense of the lost boyhood these guys are hanging on to for one final time, and the film becomes genuinely moving.
Eephus shows a side of life we don’t get to experience too often at the movies, where there are no big stars, only ordinary people showing up to play.
