Eephus

The Major League Baseball glossary explains the roots of the Eephus pitch are in Hebrew, the word eefes loosely translated to nothing, as described by a teammate (Maurice Van Robays) of the pitcher (Rip Sewell) who first regularly threw it: “Eephus ain’t nothing.” Carson Lund’s 2025 movie that takes the pitch’s name for its title is not nothing, either in a Seinfeldian sense or more broadly, but I have never seen a movie that so implicitly captures the deliberate, relaxed rhythms of a baseball game quite like this one. That is because unlike virtually all other baseball movies, which tend to climax a larger narrative through a game while sprinkling in snippets of other games via montage, “Eephus” just is a baseball game: one recounted from beginning to end. It’s as if Lund and is co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher adapted Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” but instead of recounting Game 1 of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians are recounting a fictional 1990s New England rec league game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint. 

There are a multitude of players, but “Eephus” proves less interested in developing their personal stories then in demonstrating how they all relate to one another in the context of the game. There are hits, and outs, and runs, but the camera is just as often pointed away from home plate, toward the fielders, and the base runners, eavesdropping on their between-pitch chatter and conversations in the dugout. The result of the game does not even seem to matter all that much, evoked in how one player arrives to the game late and another departs early, committed to a prior engagement. Even the umpire bails early, forcing a spectator to step in and call balls and strikes, albeit from the stands. This makeshift arbiter taken in tandem with a couple young people in the bleachers wondering what all the fuss is about and a vendor outside the stadium quietly suggest that the only thing holding the nature of any game together, really, is the collective importance we impress upon it. 

The field is scheduled to be torn down after this game, though it is not making away for something like a Kmart or a Walmart, however, but a school, shading this finality with melancholy rather than anti-capitalist fury. What, precisely, will become of these teams is never explicated, and all the men playing would rather not talk about it, and as the game stretches on, nine innings giving way to extras, day ceding to night, forcing the players to turn on their car lights and aim them at the field, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fuses with Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and the latter’s observation that “baseball time is measured only in outs” takes on the absurdist quality of the former, making it truly feel as if “the end of this game may never come.”