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Irish Examiner
14-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The best sports films and what others fail to capture
There is a special subgenre in sport of gloriously slow deception. A weird trick that exists to catch an opponent off-guard and make them look foolish. Think of football's Panenka or a tennis drop shot during heavy baseline rallies. Baseball has its own version too, although it is rarely seen in the professional game anymore. An Eephus pitch is a few degrees short of a dummy. The ball is thrown incredibly slowly, with a high, floated arc that is intended to confuse the batter. It is the opposite of a fastball and therefore an oddity in a sport that is increasingly focused on power, efficiency and data-driven precision. Modern baseball, like much of life, has little room for something that simply floats. That kind of pitch is the perfect namesake for a small, independent movie called, 'Eephus,' a sports film about a Sunday league game between a bunch of casual players in Douglas, Massachusetts, the last one before the diamond field is bulldozed. Adler's Paint and Riverdogs adult-league teams have played regularly at Soldier's Field, the public pitch serving their small town. Now the road is taking them away from this place. A sleepy crackle of a local radio broadcast opens the film, listing the accident report for the local county and the breaking news of a coyote that had been terrorising local dogs had been killed. There is the unfortunate development that the Topbury candy corn eating competition is cancelled because the whiz kid who could count really fast to tally all the candy corns had moved away. Then comes confirmation that the vote to repurpose central county land has passed. The home of Douglas baseball is the casualty. There are no plans for a replacement field. Part comedy, part elegy, Eephus is a quiet delight. The story takes place over the course of a single day. It feels destined to take its place among the baseball films that have become part of the sport's cultural heritage. What boxing has been to literature, baseball has been to cinema. Bull Durham, A League of Their Own and Moneyball have another partner. It also belongs in another category. The movies where nothing really happens. Ones not really about anything but also everything. The men range from those just starting work to those close to retirement, from lean to comfortably padded. The arc begins as they arrive and ends soon after the final inning. Eephus (2025) It is about the people who turn up for the love of the game or simply through habit. Those who play just so they can light fireworks at the end. The ones who come to drink. The Italian player on a diet who is met with a volley of jibes about pizza and cannoli. The onlooking teens who rightly see them as simply 'plumbers and shit.' Those that smile and nod in agreement at one of the film's many philosophical questions: 'Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?' Co-writer Nate Fisher plays the pitcher for Adler's Paint and he makes sure the central metaphor is clear. The star component is in the dialogue. In how it shows men who do not want to talk about certain things yet find ways to talk about them indirectly. In how the old gives way to the new and sometimes you cannot even be angry about it. A school will be built on the site. The only other diamond is far away and stinks. For many of these players, this is their last ever game. Gradually they begin to realise it. It makes you stop. Stare. Think. Consider how sport has a curious ability to run alongside life. It is not only an outlet. It's not the point in itself. It is the space between those positions. Remember the early weeks after moving to Australia and searching Ticketmaster for a single ticket to afternoon AFL matches simply to have something to do. Remember looking around the back bleachers and noticing the other men doing the exact same, the realm of the solitary and the searching. Reminisce on how sport itself was the most reliable mechanism to make friends in the subsequent weeks. How bad we can be at properly talking to those friends. It is a tribute to wistful nostalgia, even when we know it can be overly-sentimental or impractical. To low-stakes shoot-the-shit toss-arounds. To embracing those toss-arounds while we still can, even if it means scouring woods for errant balls or illuminating the field with car headlights when darkness descends. And how the world is changing all around us. It is not right to say this decade of sports movies have been barren. King Richard, The Iron Claw, The Way Back were all above decent. But the landscape is dominated by corporate promos like Air or the unfocused slog that is Happy Gilmore 2. Watching Eephus from Ireland is a challenge in itself. You can read your favourite critic's review of it, but streaming is another matter entirely. The official website lists five platforms for digital viewing, none of which work in this region. It becomes another example of the familiar frustration with modern film distribution, the way the system so often feels broken, how anyone who follows the conversation can be left waiting months for the film many are talking about, left with the creeping sense of FOMO. Why it is often so difficult to see the titles that fill the annual best-of lists? In the year of 2025, they are still somehow getting it wrong. Sometimes, it feels like it is getting worse. Eephus is a shining example of show, don't tell. It explores the gap between the sunrise and fall, in the rituals that vanish quietly, the games that happen not for glory but our own sense of belonging. This is a sports film that leaves you with a sense of why these moments matter and an unspoken farewell to the stuff that is slowly fading away.
Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘If you wreck it, they will leave': Why the new baseball movie ‘Eephus' is the reverse ‘Field of Dreams'
'Eephus' is set in the 1990s and takes place during a single game between two amateur men's baseball teams on the last day before their beloved field gets razed for a new school. There's not a plot, per se, just banter and bickering between players and among the onlookers (a mix of the passionate and the bored) and, naturally, the game itself. It's a wry and funny yet elegiac look at the way men connect and express themselves (or don't) and at the inevitable passage of time. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's a movie about the collective spirit and about a bunch of people coming to terms with a loss in their lives and feeling powerless because time and change happens,' Lund said during a recent video interview. Advertisement Nate Fisher, left, and Carson Lund attend the "Eephus" screening during the 62nd New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on Oct. 2, 2024 in New York FLC Co-writer Nate Fisher sees the film as a 'love letter' to community institutions that are eroding and a 'manifesto' about making an effort with friends and neighbors. 'It's very easy for social fabric to break down if it's not maintained,' he said. The catch is that these grown men can't fully express themselves, says the film's other co-writer, Michael Basta. 'They do so in subtext.' The unusual title comes from a rarely used novelty pitch, one thrown so slowly as to confound the batter, to wreck his timing and perhaps even his understanding of time itself. 'The film is trying to reorient your sense of baseball, of aging, of community, of America and of time,' Lund said. Keith William Richards, left, and Jack DiFonso in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films The best-known fictional example of the eephus comes Advertisement Before shooting began in October 2022, Lund checked out a hundred ballfields (about half in person), eventually discovering Soldiers Field in Douglas. 'Most places had aluminum bleachers and fences — this was all wood with chipped green paint that had been there for decades,' he said. (The field even once hosted a Lund, Fisher, and Basta wrote the film as a box score, plotting the action and then figuring out where to show players chatting in the dugout or onlookers commenting on (or ignoring) the action. The on-field highlights include a diving catch, a play at the plate, and a home run where the batter's body language will be familiar to anyone from Red Sox Nation. (See But there's also a pop-up that seemingly disappears into the sky; a player who gets so caught up in his joke of being his own third-base coach that he gets picked off; players drinking too much between innings and hunting for lost foul balls in the woods; and a final inning completed in the dim glow of car headlights. It's baseball of and for the people. Cliff Blake, Tim Taylor, Jeff Saint Dic, and Ethan Ward in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films 'Eephus' features two familiar faces for Boston fans. Joe Castiglione, the longtime radio voice of the Red Sox, plays a food-truck owner. 'I think they did a good job of capturing the players' love of baseball,' said Castiglione. Lund says once they'd decided to name the movie 'Eephus,' he just had to track down the pitch's most famous practitioner. Advertisement 'I love amateur ball players, people who just want to play for the love of the game,' said Bill Lee, who played at Soldiers Field in bygone days. 'I said, 'As long as I get to pitch, I'll come.'' Lee, 78, has never really stopped pitching, joining senior leagues and even hurling a complete game win in an independent minor league at 65. He plays a 'ghost of baseball's past who emerges for an inning and then disappears,' Lund said, a vanishing that recalls 'Field of Dreams.' (Fisher calls this film a 'Reverse 'Field of Dreams' — 'if you wreck it they will leave.') Lund is uncertain that Lee read his pages, and Lee acknowledged that 'I don't stick to scripts. I just have the ability to say what they really want to say in my own words.' While we only see one inning on screen, Lee says he faced 12 batters during filming. 'I cut down those guys — there was only one tough out, and I got him pretty good, too,' he said. 'I had good stuff. I wanted to play more.' But the film returns to the local guys, many played by Lund's friends, with a mix of local actors. 'This is not a film about excellent players . . . I just needed them to look like they've played before,' Lund said, adding that he had to 'reshape the script on the fly at times, based on what certain actors were capable of athletically. But I'm proud of how it feels like a mix of real New Englanders.' Keith Poulson, Ari Brisbon, David Pridemore, and Chris Goodwin in "Eephus." Courtesy of Music Box Films Fisher, who never really pitched before and wasn't that good at baseball, plays a reliever. 'Some of my better pitches made it into the final cut,' he said. Advertisement Like Lee, the actors were also allowed to improvise. 'The movie's 80-percent scripted,' Lund said, 'but everyone was living together in a cabin in the woods [near the field], and playing baseball every day, so by week three they were teammates with such incredible chemistry that I felt we had to let some spontaneity in.' While the dialogue is frequently funny, the film carries a certain poignancy. 'There's an impending melancholy throughout,' said Lund, 'because this is about a bunch of people trying to avoid talking about that thing that's hanging over them.' It's kind of like the eephus pitch, said Basta: 'Things feel like they're going slow, and then — boom! — you're suddenly shocked by how much time has passed.' Stuart Miller can be reached at .
