Eephus (2024)

I recently recharged the love side of my love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Having followed them closely for weeks and months this past season, and finally suffering the perhaps inevitable result, a baseball movie struck me as just the thing for cheer. Eephus, however, is not a typical sports movie, which of course more often focuses on the escalating drama of a championship run, with lots of rousing and/or tender moments in the last third. See The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rocky, Bull Durham. etc., etc. Eephus has its quotient of sentiment, focusing on the last ballgame played at a field slated for demolition, making way for a new school. It’s Massachusetts, it’s October, and only a handful of spectators are on hand. The players are obvious amateurs, mostly middle-aged and older guys not remotely in physical shape. The pitcher for one side drinks beers between innings and often falls down. The slapstick did not particularly work for me. IMDb classifies Eephus as both “drama” and “comedy,” which in this case feels like a hedge because it’s hard to know what this movie is. It reminded me a lot of pictures like director Wayne Wang’s 1995 Smoke, or director and writer Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, full of random characters saying wry, eccentric things to one another. One odd fellow in the dugout here, a relief pitcher, gives us the full lowdown on the “eephus,” a high-arcing curveball that falls into the strike zone and throws off a batter’s timing. The pitch is extremely slow, clocked under 60 mph, and not used often. I guess it’s a metaphor. But Eephus also has some interesting surprises, such as voiceover narration from master documentarian Frederick Wiseman and a cameo by Red Sox / Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitches an inning. The game is barely tracked as such though we get enough information to understand it’s going into extra innings, which is where the heavy metaphors really start. They play on into the dark, then light the field with their car headlights and play on some more. I came away from Eephus more puzzled than anything, but it’s quite possible I would like it more with another look. It’s that kind of movie.