Eephus

Programmers notes: If you don’t know what eephus means, you’re not alone. It’s a real word, and a baseball term no less–but I didn’t know that before googling, and most people in my baseball group-chat also drew a blank. And yet, once you know what it means, there could be no more perfect name for this film. The eephus pitch, so rarely thrown as to be nearly mythological, is one that approaches the batter so slowly relative to all other pitches, and with such an impossibly high arc, that it feels like there’s no way it could cross the plate as a strike. But every once in a blue moon, it does. And its few practitioners have typically been bona fide oddballs like Bill “Spaceman” Lee (who cameos here), the kind of proudly unreformed personalities who gave baseball so much flavor in the 1970s.

So too is Eephus as a film: a slow-build comedy that follows a ragtag assortment of amateur ballplayers who gather on a baseball diamond doomed for demolition for one final game over the course of an afternoon. It’s a stylized film, but not in the maximalist Hollywood sense; this is not Field of Dreams, but something closer to the baseball cinema of Richard Linklater; which is to say (hot take incoming!) something closer to the true spirit of the game. And In paying as much attention to the folks on the bench and in the bleachers as it does the action on field, baseball as framed by Eephus also serves as a poignant metaphor for the state of cinema: as less-dedicated people move on to distractions more flashy and immediate, those who really love the art form dig their heels in deeper and continue to play, moving forward with a reverence for its history and a desire to add to it. 

— Eric Allen Hatch

Director Carson Lund expected for post-film Q+A.