“Eephus” Is as Surprising as the Baseball Pitch It’s Named For

The old film studios had house styles: M-G-M’s was plush and sentimental, Warner Bros.’ stark and intense. A fledgling independent-film collective, Omnes Films, goes a step further, having not only a house style, of loosely structured and finely observed microdramas, but also a house theme: finality and the making of memories. These traits marked the first feature by the Omnes co-founder Tyler Taormina, “Ham on Rye,” about high-school classmates’ dispersal after graduation, and his third, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” about an extended family’s last holiday in its matriarch’s house. The new Omnes feature, “Eephus,” is the first to be directed by Carson Lund, who was Taormina’s cinematographer on those films and now brings his own perspective to the Omnes style and theme. Lund’s subject is baseball, his premise is historical, and his dramatic mode, though no less sharp-eyed and fragmented than Taormina’s, is rooted in documentary filmmaking.

“Eephus” is set on a Sunday in October, sometime in the nineteen-nineties, at a baseball diamond in the small New England town of Douglas. A school is going to be built on the site of the field, and two teams, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, are about to play the last game that will ever be held there. The players, all men, range from college age to graybeard, from lithe to lumbering, and they approach this farewell game with all the sentiment and ceremony it demands. In most baseball movies, the sport is just a part of some bigger drama off the field, but for Lund the game’s the thing: the movie begins as the players arrive and ends soon after the game does. Baseball is the star, the game is the story, and the only conflicts that matter are the ones that the athletes resolve in play.

Nonetheless, in Lund’s keenly discerning view, the game—its swings and misses, hits and runs, acrobatic catches and awkward miscues—is inseparable from the human element that goes into each of these crucial yet infinitesimal incidents. That element is not limited to matters of strategy and execution; it also includes distractions, emotionally charged foibles, random chitchat, and targeted ballbusting—and involves the match’s handful of spectators and people only peripherally connected to the game. You’d need a radar gun to keep track of the movie’s zinging, often ribald dialogue, which leaps along with mercurial glee. At one point, the Riverdogs heckle their opponents by yelling out the names of Italian dishes to distract a batter as a pitch comes in. There’s more Italian food where that came from: the fact that an easily hittable pitch is called a “meatball” leads players in the dugout to come up with ever more fanciful culinary epithets, and a pizza truck arrives, run by one Mr. Mallinari (played by the former Boston Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione), whose amiable salesmanship gives rise to a confessional monologue about his hatred for his job and his dreams of the open road.

Those interactions spring from the rich loam of history and lore that gives the sport its halcyon glow, and from which even a humble amateur game absorbs vicarious grandeur. No one is more rooted in that lore than the scorekeeper, Franny (Cliff Blake), who takes on his mission with a rigid but joyful sense of devotion that’s manifested in the virtual prayer (borrowed from Lou Gehrig’s farewell address at Yankee Stadium, in 1939) that he intones, with self-deprecating humor, before and after the game. (The sacramental aspect is reinforced by the frequent pealing of church bells.)

Lund, who co-wrote the film’s script with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, builds the game into an overarching, existential drama. To start with, it’s uncertain whether it can even be played. One of the Riverdogs is running late, and the home-plate umpire is intransigent about the rule that each team must field nine players; he also has a hard out at a certain hour, leaving the teams in a state of potential anarchy. (The players are dubious about reaching a consensus: “Making baseball a democracy?” “We’re all gonna kill each other.”) Then, once things get going, the teams start running out of baseballs, having underestimated how many would be hit into the surrounding wilds. Finally, human drama yields to the natural order: the sun goes down. The field is increasingly engulfed in darkness, and—with the score tied—the players must choose between the reckless absurdity of playing a night game without lights and the eternal purgatory of leaving the final contest unresolved.

The two teams encompass a wide range of personalities: there’s the sad sack Bobby (Brendan “Crash” Burt) and the volatile military veteran Rich (Ray Hryb), who tangles with the Riverdogs’ smooth-surfaced founder, Graham (Stephen Radochia). Several players are in college, and one is said to have pro-ball potential that his girlfriend is imperilling by not letting him move to Florida. Tightly compressed scenes crystallize microdramas of melancholy comedy: a middle-aged Riverdog named Bill Belinda (Russ Gannon), the only one whose family comes to the games, worries that his children won’t get to see him play again; the Adler’s Paint pitcher Ed (Keith William Richards), intent on pitching a complete game, is visited by his brother Al (Wayne Diamond), a loudmouth in a loud suit, who has other ideas. The skill of pitching plays a special role in the plot, as when the Riverdogs’ pitcher, who’s been drinking beer, doubts whether he can continue. As the team has no extra players, the future of the game is again in question. The solution, too good to spoil here, involves a sacrilegious yet principled breach of a basic rule—and a tweak to a pitcher’s very identity.

The movie’s exotic title is the name of a peculiar and venerable pitch, a high-arcing floater that seems easy to hit but instead may tantalize batters. It’s funny-looking and rare, cultivated by the few pitchers who throw it as a nonconformist idiosyncrasy—as much an assertion of style as a competitive edge. An Adler’s Paint relief pitcher (played by Nate Fisher, the co-writer) explains the pitch’s deceptive virtues in aesthetic, almost metaphysical terms: because it “stays in the air forever,” it can make a hitter “lose track of time.” Not long thereafter, a white-haired, sharp-tongued visitor comes to the Riverdogs’ dugout—a former pitcher named Lee, thirty years retired, who says he played on the very same field back then. (“It’s a shame those pricks are building a school here,” he adds.) He’s played by the real-life former major-league pitcher Bill (Spaceman) Lee, an eephus exponent with a reputation as a baseball eccentric. He declares himself ready to pitch a good inning for them, and does so with flamboyant use of his eephus, which Lund delights in showing alongside the bright-light personality of its hurler.

Where Lund depicts baseball, he seemingly X-rays it to reveal a plethora of fine points and arcana that, once grasped, yield up the hidden meanings of infinitesimal gestures. “Why do they care so much?” a player’s daughter asks. “Don’t they have more important things going on?” Doubtless they do, the movie suggests, but nothing quite as meaningful or beautiful. In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself. The camera gets close to the players and intersects freely with the action in ways that would be impossible for a broadcast or a spectator. An inspired variety of angles emphasizes the disparate and complex nature of ordinary plays, as when a ball fielded far away by an outfielder is thrown toward the camera to a second player, who then pegs it to a nearby infielder, who in turn tags the runner from the opposing team—all in one tight, tense, continuous, deep-focus shot. When a player hits a game-tying home run, the moment is purged of commonplace exultation: the view stays fixed on the field, far from the action, as the dejected opponents huff and grumble; the hitter, rounding the bases in the distant background, looks like an extra. Lund contextualizes the game with the primal joy of a day outside—a view of a puffy cloud, the charm of autumn foliage, a glimpse of the moon while the sun is still shining—and he catches the players distractedly delighting in the natural spectacle, too, as if enshrining it in their future nostalgia for this final match.

The Omnes spirit, its sense of an ending, gets an extra kick from the way that “Eephus” circles back to its beginning. No one talks politics during the game, but politics undergird the action from the start: the movie opens with a radio host announcing a municipal board’s decision to replace the field with the school. The actor voicing the host is the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor whose movies (including one called “State Legislature”) probe the workings of a wide range of civic and public institutions. Just as, in major-league baseball, a team’s presence in a given town or city often depends on government subsidies for the construction of a stadium—and on the politicking that such plans entail—so the Douglas amateurs, blissfully detached from their lives while out standing in their field, remain, more than ever, part of their world. ♦