The thing about baseball is the rhythm. We spend our time talking, being quiet, looking at the sky, looking back at the field, and waiting for those brief moments of high intensity that punctuate, or maybe that puncture, the atmosphere as we otherwise float along, waiting for another one of those moments. Time moves differently, or maybe not at all, even as the world keeps going all around us. And more than anything else, this is what the new movie Eephus gets about the game and what it means.
It's the last day in the life of a baseball field in a small New Hampshire town, the last game there on a day in mid-October, as the field is scheduled for demolition to make way for a new middle school. No one knows if there will be another field, soon or ever. The men from the beer league arrive to play that last game, slowly making their way in, many of them old, though some not, most of them in various states of being out of shape, though some not, some of them has-beens, some of them never-weres, all of them there because they love it, although for a few it seems to be more of a pained obligation. And we’re with them as they talk, as they feel the crisp air of the day, with their conversations only occasionally interrupted by what’s happening on the field:
Merritt Nettles: The eephus pitch is a type of curveball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter and he swings too early or too late. You lob it so it looks like a curveball, but you give it no pow [BAT CRACK]—double if he can leg this out [YELLING]
As day turns to night, you keep playing, because baseball can’t end in a tie and there’s no clock to stop you. And you keep playing even as your sight dims, because sometimes there really is no tomorrow. And at some point, it’s over, with barely even a whimper, let alone a bang, all that potential energy vaporized into the dark. And then you go home. But for a while, there was baseball.
Eephus is available on VOD.
