Baseball has many forms, from the pros on pristine big-league diamonds to the crabgrass-strewn fields where I now coach my young children.
There are innumerable intermediary variants, including a Wiffle ball game invented by my old high school friends called Boosh Ball, coined for a playful mispronunciation of the bushes in front of Draper Cottage where the games were played. Where the ball landed determined the type of hit. It was slow-paced, no base running allowed.
While modern baseball emphasizes speed and expediency, prizing velocity and hastening the pace with the pitch clock, “Eephus,” both the pitch and the recently released movie of the same name, are throwbacks to a bygone era. As a character in the film explains, the eephus — a slowly lobbed, high-arcing pitch intended to disrupt a hitter’s timing — practically stops time.
The film is the directorial debut of Carson Lund, who also co-wrote the script, and is set at a singular location, a ball field hosting a rec game in south-central Massachusetts in the 1990s. Although a pair of local icons — former Red Sox pitcher Bill (Spaceman) Lee and radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione — make cameos, the largely plot-free movie is as much an elegy to decaying civic engagement as it is about baseball.
When “Eephus” appeared at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, it received a standing ovation despite being presented in French subtitles to a non-endemic audience. A New York Times critic’s pick, it is now getting distribution to more than 100 theaters nationally.
The premise: The field will soon be demolished to build a public school. There’s no villain, nor are there really protagonists. It’s not always clear what inning or time it is, except the sky keeps darkening.
“It creates its own sense of time,” Lund said. “That ability to just lose yourself in the flow of a game — we’re losing that from the modern world.”
Three executive producers on the film, incidentally, are co-creators of the aforementioned Boosh Ball. Two, Brian Clark and Mike Tonelli, were my teammates in high school baseball. (The third, Ashish Shetty, was a football teammate.)
In a small-town New England twist, Tonelli’s aunt knew the father of co-writer Nate Fisher. “She directed them to me originally because I, quote-unquote, ‘look at slides’ and could give them feedback on their pitch deck for investors,” said Tonelli, a management consultant who laughed at the listed total addressable market: 50% of the world’s 8 billion people who had heard of baseball. He suspects the deck was really sent so he’d personally invest — and it worked. “I loved the vision,” Tonelli said.
Tonelli called Shetty, a private equity investor with a creative streak — he performed stand-up comedy in New York and was an executive producer on the Liam Neeson movie “Marlowe” — and recruited Clark, a gastroenterologist. “Eephus” is a paean harking back to the old glory days.
“That little bit of activity and competitiveness, even in Boosh Ball, adds a lot to that socializing,” Shetty said, who wants moviegoers to leave the theater remembering it’s important to “connect with people because it’s good for you, it’s fun. You never know how much that company can mean to other people.”
That’s certainly the case of Franny in the movie, a loner who keeps score and gets pressed into service as umpire when the paid ump hits his time limit and leaves. The players in the movie aren’t entirely sure why they are so desperate to finish the game, with one ultimately concluding, “We gotta finish just to say we did it.”
“I wanted to capture that feeling in this movie — the feeling that you get when it’s getting darker and your mom’s saying, ‘Come back, it’s dinner time,’ and you’re just trying to hold on to it as long as you can,” Lund said.
A few motifs of classic baseball films seep in, including the sight of Franny walking into the woods at the movie’s end, in an almost reverse-“Field of Dreams” moment.
“If you tear it down,” Lund said, “they will leave.”
