There's a gentle rhythm to baseball that mirrors a quiet summer evening around a bonfire — it's cooling off but the day's humidity still hangs around, a breeze comes and goes without any sort of consistency, and jovial laughter sporadically breaks out, followed by a comfortable silence spent staring into the orange flames. Carson Lund remarkably finds this intangible feeling and paints each frame and moment of his directorial debut, Eephus, with a distinctively familiar yet indescribable vibe.
The film follows the final game of a New England adult men's baseball team, ahead of their ballpark's demolition to make way for a school. Set in a small Massachusetts town in the 1990s, Adler's Paint face off against the Riverdogs — not for glory, since it's not a championship game or one with any stakes attached to it. They're facing off for the sake of it; because they signed up for the league last fall, as they'd done for years.
Eephus moves slowly — it's a baseball game after all. Nothing of great note happens in the film other than the tense moment when the sun begins to set and we discover that the diamond's lights aren't in use anymore. The umpire says he's going home, but the two sides stay and finish nine innings. We're given glimpses into the players' lives and dynamics, often with amusing results. But Eephus isn't a character study or an epic sports drama.
It's a movie that captures the granular, random tedium of life, taking a snapshot of the moment you and your friends say goodbye to the places and people that became a big part of your life without even realizing it. Eephus presents us with a nostalgia that's somehow universally felt, even for those too young to have experienced the '90s.
Lund, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, bypasses everything we've come to expect from a baseball movie (or a sports movie for that matter). The baseball almost serves as background noise, though, the main focus remains a plotless story that brings together small scuffles, non-sequitur anecdotes and, at times, big emotions.
The titular eephus pitch follows a high-arcing trajectory, similar to a softball pitch. It's unusually slow and contains little to no movement, except for its slow-motion descent into the catcher's glove, all in the hopes of catching the batter off guard. Lund's Eephus stays true to its namesake, with us, his audience, waiting in the batter's box for the pitch to finally land. We're caught off guard, and we'll head back to the dugout knowing we got got, but it's okay — it's the memories we've conjured that will stick with us as we head home, win or lose.
The Calgary Underground Film Festival 2025 takes place from April 17–27. Find details, including information about tickets, at the festival's website.