‘Eephus’ is the best baseball movie since ‘Moneyball’

In Carson Lund’s “Eephus,” two teams — the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint — gather on a neighbourhood field for a baseball game. The leaves are already starting to turn — “It’s getting late early,” as Yogi Berra said — and this is to be the final game for their adult rec league.

The field is to be demolished. No one would confuse them for all-stars. A suicide squeeze unfolds in creaky slow motion. The rotund left fielder mutters “Mother McCree” under his breath when the ball is hit in the gap. But, regardless of skill level, they all care sincerely about the game.

“Eephus,” as leisurely as a late-August double header, simply unfolds along with their game. Except to chase a foul ball or two, the movie stays within the lines of Soldier Field, the nondescript Massachusetts baseball field they’re playing on sometime in the 1990s.

It spans nine innings, with dugout chatter and fading light. In this slow-pitch gem of a baseball movie — a middle-aged “Sandlot” — time is slipping away, but they’re going down swinging.

Money, analytics and whatever’s on ESPN can sometimes cloud what sports is to most people: A refuge. “Eephus,” in that way, is a change-up of a baseball movie, an elegiac ode to the humbler weekend warriors who are driven by nothing but genuine affection for the game. Richly detailed and mordantly deadpan, “Eephus” adopts their pace of play, soaking up all the sesame-seed flavour that goes along with it.

The title comes from an unnaturally slow pitch not slung but lobbed toward home. When I was a kid pitching, I liked to uncork one from time to time, much to my coach’s dismay. The metaphor isn’t hard to grasp. One player describes it as a pitch you can get bored watching, even making you lose track of time.

Much of the same applies to “Eephus,” which drifts player to player, play to play, less as an ensemble piece than like a roving spectator. The guys, themselves, have no more than a handful of fans, including the diehard scorekeeper Fanny (Cliff Blake). Frederick Wiseman, the great documentarian whose films chronicle nothing so much as institutions kept alive over time, is the voice of the announcer.

I earlier called Lund’s film an ode, but it’s not a sentimental movie. Time’s passage, which no ballgame or perfectly thrown eephus can halt, grows increasingly disquieting as the afternoon light gives way to nightfall.

That, to finish the game, they play into near-total darkness, with only headlights to see the ball, is a sign of desperation as much as it is commitment. After all, one guy in the dugout is listening to a radio broadcast of a ballgame, from 1972.

What’s being lost? It’s not a strip mall the field is to be turned into but something harder to quibble with: a school. They could drive half an hour to another field, but that’s said to be half Little League, half farmer’s market. They aren’t a collection of pals, either. They don’t hang out away from the diamond. Things they don’t talk about: work, families, politics. Things they do: eyecare for the ump.

In the annals of baseball movies, “Eephus” doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame with “Bull Durham” or “A League of Their Own.” The closest it gets to the big leagues is an appearance by Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the 1970s southpaw and eephus adherent.

But “Eephus” is just as deserving of a place in that hardball pantheon, only in some minor ball realm, well below single A. Here, they don’t throw “high cheese” but such meatballs that, as one player riffs, you could call it pasta primavera. To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it’s a lovely way to pass some time.

Associated Press