By Riley Hamilton
It’s fall, and the days are slowly turning toward another Massachusetts winter. Baseball season is ending, and for one amateur baseball league in ’90s New England, this season could be its last.
That’s the premise of Eephus, which starts screening Friday, April 4. An impending construction project on a beloved community baseball field creates an uncertain future for two beer-fueled rec league teams, as they play their final game. Reveling in its finality, Eephus feels like both a funeral and a celebration. That befits a film about baseball — a game that’s regularly pronounced dead and done, yet persists as the eternal Americana.
There’s a wonderful specificity in the script by Nate Fisher, Michael Basta and first-time director Carson Lund. Yes, you’ll find the familiar trappings of other baseball films: the crack of the bat, sunflower seeds and scorecards, a tapestry of offbeat personalities and profane chatter. But what’s most surprising, and ultimately exciting, is the ways that it is not about baseball at all.
As the game progresses, all 18 players reckon with a realization: “It gets late early out there.” (Yogi Berra said that. I’m sorry to quote a New York Yankee in a Massachusetts-based film.) A sentimentality washes over each profanity, pitch and hit. Every moment could be the last of its kind. It’s both fascinating and heartbreaking to watch hardened men realizing that the end is near and that baseball will soon be gone too.
We assume the good things in our lives will be waiting for us again tomorrow. But sometimes you see schools get built and your cathedrals torn down. One day, there’s no more ball to be played. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Come check out the confidently crafted debut feature from Carson Lund and enjoy Eephus as it graces the big screen at The Independent Picture House, starting Friday. As Yogi once said, “You can observe a lot by watching.”