Review: 'Eephus' pits middle-aged men against Father Time
The movie looks like baseball movie, but it has a more profound story to tell.
"Eephus" takes place on a late October day on the last day for a sandlot in a small Massachusetts town.
Two rec league men’s baseball teams — the Riverdogs and Alder’s Paint — gather for a final game sometime in the 1990s.
The town voted to build a new middle school on the site. Decades of tradition will be plowed under for progress.
That’s life. Tear down the old. Make way for the new.
The movie takes its name from a slow, arching pitch that lingers in the air before dropping into the strike zone.
The pitch resembles the underhand tosses to batters in slow-pitch softball leagues.
“Eephus” looks like a baseball movie, a kind of “The Sandlot” for middle-aged men.
But like many movies that use the sport as a setting, “Eephus” tells us much more about life than balls and strikes.
The rec league players are middle-aged men. They wear the mileage of their years on their faces and bodies.
They’re too old to play a game for kids.
Somewhere in their rational minds, they understand that.
But their hearts won’t give up on one more chance to play a game most men their age long ago took themselves out of the lineup and remained only as spectators.
They are foul-mouthed. They drink beer in copious quantities.
The pitcher for the Riverdogs appears to be a functioning alcoholic.
Well, he’s functional as a pitcher, but when he bats, he’s so blotto he spins out and crashes to the ground.
A catcher on the rival Alder’s Paint team complains about the pain in his knees while his teammate talks about the aches in his back.
The film avoids baseball movie tropes such as come-from-behind victories or epic performances. The play is, at best, competent, but unremarkable.
There’s a younger guy on the Riverdogs who is playing ball at the local community college, but he is merely sturdier in the field of old lions.
The eephus is thrown during the game but makes no magic. Sometimes it gets hit. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The game moves slowly, so slowly in fact that the umpires leave after 2 hours — the amount of time for which they were played.
“You can’t call it now,” pleads one of the players from the Alder’s Paint club. “The whole game would be pointless.”
The umpire keeps stride as he leaves the field.
“It was already pointless, fellas,” he said, not looking back.
The dutiful, elderly scorekeeper is pressed into umpiring duties; he abandons his usual folding chair for a spot in the press box, monitoring the plate as best he can from the perch.
The teams play on as the sun slips farther down the autumn sky.
One man is forced to leave due to a family event. He planned on pitching all nine, but every man's time between the chalk lines is limited.
Dusk falls. The few family members and girlfriends who came to watch the men have left.
One of the Riverdogs encourages his wife and daughter to stay through his next at-bat. He strikes out. They leave.
“That might be the last time my daughter gets me to play,” he tells his teammate.
“She’s so young she won’t remember,” his buddy says.
“She’s 11,” the father replies.
His teammate shrugs.
Dusk gives way to darkness. The game remains tied. The field has lights, but they can’t be turned on.
The men park their cars on the field and shine their headlights on the infield.
They play on. Balls hit into the outfield drop and players haplessly search.
A surly member of Alder’s Paint shouts, “What are we doing?”
He gets into his car and drives away.
The men stay. The game eventually ends in the most mundane way.
The men gather their equipment, thank the old scorekeeper, and drive away.
Baseball is like that. Not much happens, yet everything happens.
"Eephus" is the kind of movie you feel in your bones and blood. It tells an essential truth without ever mentioning it: Age remains undefeated.
Growing up is a series of negotiations and compromises. Our younger selves believed some things would always be true, but as we grow older, shades of gray slip into both our hair and perception.
Aging is a series of pleas and prayers to hold onto those things that always had an expiration date.
So much of the American male identity is intertwined with his physical prowess — what he physically can do.
Entropy limits us all. Even the greatest ballplayers are finished by their late 30s.
The men in this movie, like most of us, are not great ballplayers. Their bodies and lives have drifted away from Sunday afternoons on the field.
That’s a hard thing to admit, that you can’t do a thing you used to do with ease.
I saw myself in those middle-aged men, trying to push the sun back into the sky for one more game, yet weighted down by arthritic knees. Guys with walkers don't slide into second base.
As Bob Dylan sings, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."
“Eephus” is a beautiful, melancholy movie about men, baseball, and the terrible realities of getting old.
Not much happens, yet everything happens.
Daniel P. Finney is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, but don’t hold that against them. Please visit their page to view a full roster of writers and consider subscribing to their columns. Writing is hard work; people ought to get paid for it. If you enjoy it, throw them a couple of bucks. They earned it. But subscribe to me first, because I’m a ruthless, money-grubbing capitalist like that.