Sport
Eephus, a languid film about ageing recreational baseball players engaged in an epic game, reminds the author of his childhood on pitches and fields – when sport framed how he saw the world. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
A pitch to nostalgia in the baseball film Eephus
Our coach was a widower, and his young son our teammate. Mr Butler was a bearded giant and exceptionally warm, but around Ben was an aura of great sadness that he was too young to disguise. This should have precluded the jokes and impatient criticism of his more talented peers, but it didn’t. Plenty of us were unthinkingly savage: Ben was a questionable talent first; a motherless child second.
Together we made up the local under-12s cricket side. Beyond Mr Butler’s drills and patient technical counsel, he wrote up our match reports for the local newspaper, careful to evenly spread praise between all of us over the season. For the less gifted – for those unlikely to make the highest score or take the most wickets – there was no achievement too small to catch his eye and find itself glorified in the Echo.
It was to Mr Butler’s house that our families went for the club’s Christmas pool party, and at training sessions he sometimes brought bags of lollies and an ex-Test player – the off-spinner Bruce Yardley. Mr Butler was a cheerful presence, but only now do I wonder how much his son’s athletic clumsiness and subsequent self-consciousness and social estrangement must have pained him.
It was to this man that I owe the longevity of specific advice. Curiously, what has stuck most stubbornly are fielding tips. I can hear them still. You always “put a name” on a skied ball to avoid colliding with a teammate. When fielding a fast groundstroke, don’t reach down for it lest you miss it and the gate made by your splayed legs allows the ball to continue past you – instead, crouch and provide a wall with your thigh. When in the outfield, one should walk in as the bowler makes their run-up, so you’re already moving and better prepared to respond should the ball be played towards you. And, finally, I can recall the advice to back up other fielders – to anticipate when they might attempt a run-out and to position yourself in line with the throw on the other side of the stumps should the ball miss. Basics.
I was an advanced player until I wasn’t. In boyhood I was long devoted to cricket and I’d acquired a sound bowling action before most, but at some point the others caught up in technique and then physically eclipsed me. I stopped growing and the others didn’t, and soon my pace bowling became conspicuously slow and unthreatening.
It’s perhaps for this reason that the advice I most remember concerns fielding and not the game’s two core skills of bowling and batting. It was the one thing I still comfortably excelled at and my favourite training drill was when the slips machine was dragged out from the shed. It was a metal cradle that resembled a hammock and you’d hurl the ball onto it flat, like you were skimming a stone, and the curvature would dramatically deviate the ball’s trajectory for those waiting on the other side. I loved it.
My other memory? Of movie night at school camp and Ben weeping as City Slickers played on a projection screen. I still had the bra I’d worn for an earlier skit some of us had performed – I can’t remember where I sourced that – and thinking it might make him chuckle, I put it on over my jumper and sat next to him.
I thought of all this after watching Eephus, the recent directorial debut of American Carson Lund, a film of limited distribution and uncertain release in Australia. Eccentrically slow and plotless, its whole subject – ostensibly, at least – is a Sunday beer league baseball match played in a small New England town.
Upon this suburban diamond, ringed by autumnal oaks, the mostly middle-aged and paunch-stricken members of the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint converge. They’ve come to say goodbye: this will be the last game played on their beloved field before it’s replaced with a public school.
Eephus is named for an exotic baseball pitch, rarely seen because it’s effectively a high-arcing slow ball thrown to surprise the batter. A lollipop that “stays in the air forever,” explains one character. “You get bored watching it. I get bored.”
It’s an obvious metaphor for the film itself, which I can only assume will alienate most people with its cheerful commitment to the languid pace of baseball. Eephus has no interest in plot or drama, but rather in lovingly recording the minutiae of a ritual played out against its twilight.
And so the morning gives way to the afternoon, which gives way to the golden hour. The game, still unresolved, loses its umpire; he has fulfilled his hours and can’t be persuaded to stick around. Some are a few beers deep; most are nursing sore backs, hips and elbows.
Still, the prospect of their final match ending in a tie seems unsatisfactory, almost improper. It’s dark now, and the headlights of the players’ cars are turned into floodlights while their devoted scorekeeper is conscripted as umpire. You might say that nothing happens in the film – nothing except a game no one wants to end and that offers a temporary but sacred detachment from everything else.
I think my favourite part of the movie is the sudden, improvised shouting of various ingredients of Italian sandwiches to put the batter off. It becomes a charming performance, inspired and utterly dumb.
When I was a young soccer player, a favourite psyop of mine was the non sequitur. I remember one match, where I was playing up front, being aggressively pestered off the ball by my defender. He was a large and sullen chap, physically slow but quick to abuse, and when the ball was at the other end, I took pleasure in earnestly asking him what his favourite dishes were as if he were a cousin and not a stranger elbowing my ribs and abusing my mother. Met with confused silence, I insisted he tell me whether he preferred roast pumpkin or potato.
I’m not sure what advantage this gave me, if any, but I scored in that match. And the trick to confounding thugs, I learnt, was feigning intense interest in their answer to whether they prefer spaghetti or the shorter pastas. My God, I had fun.
“Don’t they have more important things going on?” asks the young daughter of one of the players in Eephus. Almost certainly – but nothing like this.
Our Sunday match and Wednesday training session wasn’t enough for me. I played cricket – and basketball, soccer and footy – whenever and wherever I could. If I was at home, condemned by rain or curfew, I’d transform our hallway into a cricket pitch and bully my indifferent siblings into competing with paper balls.
In my street we turned driveways into cricket pitches and played until after the sun set and our parents yelled irritably for our return. We pretended we couldn’t hear them, just as we pretended we could still see the ball.
So it is with the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint. They too want to keep playing, well after it’s sensible to do so, and despite their swollen guts and ribald banter there’s communion here with the purity of childhood’s street games. Just one more pitch; one more innings.
Lund doesn’t overstretch. He doesn’t try to stuff baseball with profundity. There’s no suggestion the game is inherently magical. There are no sharp cuts and swelling strings to exaggerate baseball’s dynamism. The film, like the game itself, is quiet and takes its sweet time – and if there’s anything magical, it’s simply the players’ salty, passionate observance of a beloved ritual.
A perfect eephus pitch, says a character, can make a batter “lose sense of time” – a poetic way of saying an ultra-slow ball confounds the batter’s instincts for receiving pitches at a certain velocity. In a different way, so too did slip machines and driveway games magically alter my sense of the hourglass, and we rebelled when the setting sun reminded us of it.
I now like to think the game benevolently altered time for Mr Butler too. That his commitment to improving our technique, to filling scorecards and writing our match reports, might have dilated his sense of warm, purposeful time and helped shrink that of being a grieving single father with a lost boy.
I don’t know. I only know that time is experienced differently by adults, not least because we’re painfully aware of it. The waters we swam in then seemed endless; Mr Butler knew their finitude.
Eephus summoned all this for me. It’s a heroically modest film, sentimental but never mawkish, and careful in its attention to the game itself and its intricate lacework of lore. And in its modesty, it made me think of all the things our games might channel, sublimate or distract us from. Not professional games, but those played by us middle-aged amateurs with vulgar tongues and crook knees and some latent memory of when our joints were loose and so too our sense of time.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "As time slows by".
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