So Unnaturally Slow

Matthew K. Ritchie considers Carson Lund’s “Eephus” and the feeling of being washed-up.

By Matthew K. RitchieApril 15, 2025

• Film

• Sports

AS THE SUMMER INCHED toward its merciful end and the Las Vegas heat began to relent, I noticed that all of the batting cages in the city had disappeared. Not the privatized, state-of-the-art indoor facilities that could be rented by the hour so youth teams and elite high school prospects had a place to hone their skills—those pay-for-play sites were alive and well. I was concerned with a true endangered species, the cages of a more municipal flavor. The cages that often found themselves attached to driving ranges, mini-golf courses, and go-kart tracks. The cages that only took gold coins and dispensed rubber yellow balls that seemingly fired at will, with little concern for accuracy or the safety of the batter. The cages that offered generic bats on the walls, with only a chain-link fence and a flimsy door to protect you from other patrons and goading friends. There was a specific feeling that I craved, more than a year after my baseball career ended—unceremoniously, in a hidden corner of Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and I was hoping to return to a time when helmets were ill-fitting, swings imperfect and ugly. I was rather new to Vegas, so maybe I didn’t know where to look. But a lack of results from endless Google searches began to make me question whether these iron giants that I knew had ever existed at all.

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During the opening credits of Carson Lund’s 2024 film Eephus, the death sentence of a local baseball field in Douglas, Massachusetts, is delivered by a radio host (voiced by the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman) during his run-of-the-mill morning news reads. The beloved Soldiers Field is slated to be demolished so that an elementary school can be built in its place, an inherently positive development that will make life easier for families in the area. A step forward for accessible education in a New England town—no more driving 25 minutes to drop your kids off at school.

With the demolition looming, two amateur baseball teams descend upon Soldiers Field for one last game. The serenity of the early autumn day betrays the solemnity of the situation: the sun beams through the tree line while rustling orange leaves dance with the help of a loving breeze, as faithful scorekeeper Franny (Cliff Blake) drags his portable chair and scorebook to his preferred spot on the sidelines. Though you’ve been primed to enter this game with a feeling of melancholy, it feels like any other perfect day for baseball. Players from the two teams, the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, filter into the gravel parking lot in aggressively small-town fashion—carpooling in nondescript pickup trucks and IROC-Zs, lugging equipment that’s well past its prime (like the players who use it), toting cases of Narragansett and boxes of fireworks purchased two towns over to celebrate the final game. Hell, Garrett (Chris Goodwin), the catcher and ninth player needed for the Riverdogs, shows up late, almost forcing the game to end in a forfeit before it begins. And when he rushes up to the plate, claiming that he “stretched in the car,” he falls flat and grabs a faceful of dirt. In the same breath, everyone laughs and releases a sigh of relief, allowing their final day to begin.

Once the first pitch is actually thrown, Eephus subscribes to the architectural tenet that “form ever follows function.” It crawls forward at such a subdued rate that you barely know which inning it is while watching, taking the focus away from the game itself and letting the human element take the wheel. The eephus’s definition and function is hammered home from the very outset (and reiterated multiple times by a left-handed pitcher, played by co-writer Nate Fisher, who is a brand of weird that you only find on a team’s pitching staff). The pitch is described as “a type of curveball that is so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter,” that the looping motion of the ball “makes him lose track of time.” Though Eephus checks in at a nominally brisk 98 minutes, the seconds almost elongate past their limit when lingering on the dilapidated wood of the press box and dugouts, or on an elderly spectator who argues for the tradition of eating hot dogs at baseball games, or on a pizza truck owner named Mr. Mallinari (former Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione) waxing poetic about his true disdain for his profession.

The meandering nature of the eephus pitch parallels the film’s depiction of the game itself. A couple years back, Major League Baseball made the decision to implement a pitch clock in the hopes of speeding up play and shortening the run-time of games, which on average had crept over three hours; the organization imagined this would help buoy the sport’s popularity in the United States. It was at first a divisive move, with purists lamenting that the country’s former pastime was moving closer to basketball than the languid sport they remembered. But like most changes to a sport, the intervention gradually became the status quo. Games now feel rushed in a peculiar way that is antithetical to the laissez-faire atmosphere of the past—last calls for beer arrive earlier, making it borderline impossible to finish a 9-9-9 challenge without hurting yourself. Lund’s game, set sometime in the 1990s, is hidden from the prying claws of evolution: the only limits on time are the amount of daylight left and the patience of a pair of umpires who won’t stay past the moment their rates run out. It grants us space to get completely acclimated to the players and the idiosyncrasies through which they approach the game—and when these characters are viewed through Lund’s lens, it becomes clearer that Eephus exists more so as a way to memorialize the leisurely era of baseball—when ballparks served as true escapes away from home, palaces that could be lived in and explored before the end of a day—than a feature film.

The players span the entire spectrum of the amateur baseball life cycle—college kids attempting to stay sharp during the offseason, talented adults trying to flex their muscles and have a little fun, washed-up over-the-hillers staving off retirement—with a wide set of personalities to match. Ed (Keith William Richards), the Adler’s Paint team’s leader and starting pitcher, is dead set on throwing a complete game in what is likely to be his final time atop a pitcher’s mound. His surliness boils over as he laments the idea of a dugout being a future art classroom, or he tells a young spectator to quit playing baseball early before sending him on a mission to buy a pack of smokes, or his brother Al (Wayne Diamond) whisks him away to attend his niece’s christening. There’s the Riverdogs’ fraught military veteran Rich (Ray Hryb), who likens all of life and sport to “combat” and takes particular exception to captain Graham’s role (Stephen Radochia) in demolishing the field as a “company man.” There are players who are clearly sprier and more competent, who will head back to college programs and could even take their talents to other leagues, towns over. Then there are the weekend warriors who will clearly hang up their cleats for good once the sun sets. Riverdogs second baseman Bill Belinda (Russell J. Gannon), with his family in attendance, wonders aloud about the impact that it will have on his children that the last time they watched him play, he grounded out weakly, ending his hitting career with a whimper—the norm in a sport where failure is unremarkable, the only real constant.

Eephus’s strength stands in how relatable the gameplay and dialogue can feel even to the uninitiated—suburbanites could blink a couple of times and see their neighbors in a Riverdogs uniform. There’s a charming awkwardness to the way the final game plays out: subpar play scatters across the field, where feats of actual brilliance are few and far between—but are celebrated as such, because we all secretly wish that our home run trots be in slow motion. Large swaths of Eephus’s action occur off-screen; the only indication that anything happened at all might be the crack of the bat, or a frustrated player waddling back to the dugout. The air gets filled with aimless small talk, terse arguments that fizzle out due to their futile nature, and deadly accurate shit-talking that could only be informed by years of familiarity and care. The pair of Adler’s Paint middle infielders are particularly adept at this, chirping at anyone who gets within earshot, teammate or not. When Adler’s Paint’s “D” (David Torres Jr.) comes up to bat, already frustrated with the pace of the game and his own performance, the Riverdogs all begin to shout a chorus of Italian foods in his direction on account of his prescribed diet—a brand of heckling that comes from the heart.

While the goal for either team is to win the game, the real tension rests in how both groups of men try to negotiate against the impending ending, as waning daylight and stiffening bodies threaten the very existence of their baseball careers. In the first inning, when the Riverdogs are threatened with a forfeit, the Adler’s Paint infielders ask Ed to walk the batters so they can keep playing. When the umpires threaten to leave due to time constraints, Glen (Peter Minkarah) tries to bribe them with smoked meats sitting in his car. When they leave anyway, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs do the unthinkable—turn baseball into a democracy. They try to govern themselves, begging Franny to rule as an impartial third party when a decision is needed. The ingenuity needed to fight back the specter of darkness is so MacGyveresque that it borders on dangerous—but it’s pulled off (sort of) nonetheless. Anything to keep the game going.

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Baseball has a funny way of letting you know when it’s done with you. Contrary to the stereotypes about the amount of athleticism needed to succeed in the sport, your body still has to work. The tradition of baseball movies has made this abundantly clear: Gary Busey’s “Rocket” betraying him as his career dwindles down in Rookie of the Year (1993), Jake Taylor’s (Tom Berenger) knees barking and howling every game in Major League (1989), or even Mel Clark (Tony Danza) in Angels in the Outfield (1994), whose years of smoking have brought him to the doorstep of heaven with the titular angels waiting in the wings. Yet this brand of baseball movie, which ruled the 1980s and ’90s, depicted the twilight of a career as the venue for a grasp at immortality. Extra points if you can sacrifice said injury to claw out a victory from the jaws of defeat—that brand of sentimentality fed DVD and VHS recordings for countless nights. Those moments sometimes are afforded to the hallowed few in real life, as Franny so succinctly evokes Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the sport after his diagnosis of ALS in 1939 as a bookend: “Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

The reality for others is much more mundane. Baseball careers end unremarkably with an unnerving silence, similar to the lives of people that we loved and hated. Going out on your own terms is a luxury that’s seemingly distributed at random. (Sometimes it feels quite unfair to see who gets the storybook ending.) Personally, I’ve found the way that you can see the end approaching in the sport quite comforting. Baseball moves rather slowly, so it never feels like a surprise when the time comes. You can see it coming from a mile away. I guess that it grants you the space to make your peace with your fate, as an act of kindness. It allows you to steal a few seconds here and there, fighting for the opportunity to extend your baseball life for a little bit longer, reveling in the successes and failures as the pitches go by.

Throughout Lund’s elegy, it’s clear that this is the last time that most of the Adler’s Paint and Riverdogs players will swing a bat, or field a ground ball and throw it to first base. Health-wise, it’s probably for the best: knees and ligaments are held together by dirt and glue; by the last pitch, members of the Riverdogs are lying on the outfield grass in the dark, smoking cigarettes as if it’s the last moments before a public execution. But it’d be foolish to view their resignation as a sign of defeat. It’s more akin to gracious acceptance, knowing that they’ve given enough to the sport to be granted a willing exit. And for all the bargaining and bartering that Eephus’s players make with the baseball gods throughout the day, there’s very little pushback as the movie completes its trick, with the prophecy at the beginning being fulfilled. Right on schedule, seen from a mile away. “Is this really how it’s going to end?” is asked quietly, from the darkness, before a game-ending walk closes the careers of many with a whisper, as if they already knew the answer when they touched the dirt for the last time.