Like forbidden love and corruption, the sports world is a natural subject for movies. The conflict is ingrained – two sides vying for one victory. And there’s drama. Rocky lasts 15 rounds with the champ. The US men’s hockey team vanquishes the Soviet Union’s Goliath. A small-town basketball team improbably wins the state championship. Something happens.
Baseball, however, offers something else entirely. Most of the best baseball movies aren’t really about the game at all. Instead, they’re about the value of friendship (“The Sandlot,” 1993), or hard-earned lessons (“Bull Durham,” 1988), or working with a budget (“Moneyball,” 2011). In other words, baseball movies are not about heroics, but the stuff of real life.
Spring training is, of course, rejuvenation. The crack of the bat and the smack of the glove are the sounds of winter thawing. Corny, sure. Also true.
This year, the thing that’s sustaining me as we eagerly await the first pitch of the baseball season is a more recent entry in the long line of baseball movies. “Eephus,” the micro-budgeted indie film from Nashua, NH native Carson Lund, casts a hazy light on two teams of small-town beer leaguers playing their last-ever game in a creaky old ballpark, which is slated for demolition. Set in a nondescript New England town and shot to capture one long afternoon into evening, the film was nominated for a best first feature film award when it premiered at Cannes in 2024.
The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who recently died at age 96, shows up as the voice of a local newscast, dispensing the details of the ballpark’s demise. Two actors last seen in the Safdie brothers’ “Uncut Gems” (2019), Keith William Richards and Wayne Diamond, get prominent roles.
Red Sox fans will rejoice in cameo appearances by two of the team’s folk heroes. Joe Castiglione, the recently retired radio announcer, appears in comic relief as a food truck purveyor. And Bill Lee drops by to toss an inning.
Lee, as any self-respecting Sox lifer knows, specialized during his pro years in the novelty pitch that gives the film its name — “a type of curveball,” explains one benchwarmer (who looks not a little like the Sox’s current eccentric lefty, Payton Tolle), “so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter. Makes him lose track of time.”
That’s what the film itself does, just like the game. Most of the “action,” such as it is, involves stubborn old gamers stumbling on the basepaths. “I need to be put down,” mutters a heavyset catcher with a thicket of goatee, after he has to lunge off the bucket he sits on behind home plate.
As the sun goes down and the field begins to disappear into the gloaming, a foul pop-up goes missing. No one sees it or hears it come down.
That’s it, the umpire announces. He’s going home.
“You can’t call it now,” one player gripes. “The whole game would be pointless!”
“It was already pointless, fellas,” replies the man in blue.
Every year during spring training, I also read a book about baseball. This year’s pick is “Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America,” in which journalist Will Bardenwerper spends a season in Batavia, New York following the fortunes of a collegiate summer league team called the Muckdogs.
Nothing much happens in “Homestand” — the play-by-play action is almost an afterthought. Instead, the author focuses on a motley assortment of grandstand regulars, and their small-town connections to one another. The hours they while away together, and the importance of such seemingly trivial diversions, are the real story here.
The same kind of inertia is on full display in Lund’s film. Inevitably, some viewers will find “Eephus” slow and nonsensical, like the pitch itself.
But that is precisely what this beautiful game gives us – a welcome excuse to defy time, punctuated by periodic moments of stimulation or absurdity. We learn next to nothing about the aging boys of summer who represent the Riverdogs and the Adler’s Paint squad. They could be plumbers, firefighters, insurance salesmen, the deli manager down at the supermarket. None of that matters so long as they’re on the diamond.
With the ballpark closing down, they won’t be on the diamond long. But many of them have stuck it out, straining to pull on their cleats and wrestling into their jerseys, far longer than they had any right to.
“Can’t quit this field, huh?” says one of the ballpark’s denizens. “It doesn’t want to stop playing.”