Eephus (2024)

A pair of adult rec league baseball teams meet for the final game at their local field, before it's paved over to make room for a new middle school. The game carries on from the afternoon into the night, with the few fans, the umps, and even some of the players drifting away. The rest keep playing, determined to see the game through to the proper ending they think the field deserves.

The film moves at the pace of a baseball game, which is to say, leisurely. We see a lot of the game action. The actors were expected to at least approximate playing, and you can tell which ones had more experience, especially when it comes to sliding. But these are mostly middle-aged guys, playing a game they loved for decades. Greying beards, scraggly hair and beer guts. They shouldn't look graceful, and they sure don't.

Apperson Paint's leftfielder could do a pretty convincing Santa Claus impression, based on his body shape. The Riverdogs' pitcher has a goofy windup that suggests he saw Craig Kimbrel and decided to look even stupider. Apperson's back-up pitcher has the mustache and pitching motion of an escapee from the Dead Ball era. Their catcher, by the later innings, is sitting on a footstool behind the plate, because his knees can't take it. 

That's part of what's perfect about the film. In a sense, this game means nothing. The teams aren't playing for anything other than bragging rights. Guys on the same team are all wearing different shirts, united only by colors. Apperson's coach leaves (reluctantly) mid-game because he was about to miss his niece's christening. Another guy gets fed up and just drives away. Yet that guy also got incredibly pissed when the other team, knowing he was on a diet, started taunting him by calling out different types of food while he was batting. Then the ump made them cut it out. 'Am I in a deli? Am I trying to sell you ham?' was my favorite line.

The Riverdogs' first baseman keeps bragging about the fireworks he bought to set off after the game, even lying about what a deal he got on them. Their goofy pitcher, after taking a line drive to the chest, ices it down in between innings with a beer. When their coach tells him not to put that one back in the cooler, Troy shrugs and pops the beer, taking a long swig. When one player finds no coach at third base to advise him, he decides to just be his own third base coach, including having fake conversations with himself. This does not go well.

Later, when Troy says he needs a breather, a random guy (actually former major leaguer Bill "Spaceman" Lee) who just showed up because he played on this field decades ago and wanted to see it one last time, agrees to pitch an inning. In his slacks and polo shirt. Then Troy resumes pitching the next inning like nothing happened. Despite one player pimping his home run to dead center with a nice slow trot around the bases, or another guy screaming at his teammate for being too conservative in whether to send runners or not, this is nothing like a serious game.

And yet, given multiple opportunities to call it, they keep playing, unwilling to let it end in a tie. The first baseman tries bribing one of the umps to stick around longer, using pork loins he won in a meat lottery. When it gets too dark, they drive their cars onto the edge of the field and use headlights. The scorer tries to ump from the empty press box. Players wander the woods retrieving baseballs because they're running out. Whether for pride, or just a refusal to let go of something that's been a big part of their lives for who knows how many years, they won't just, stop and say enough. The game ends only when it truly ends.

Which makes it sound like some horrible, purgatorial existence. I don't think that's the vibe intended, but watching them stagger around like blind men, trying to field baseballs they can't even see, has a certain feel of torment to it.

But release is no blessing. The losing pitcher sits down on the mound, head between his knees, dejected he couldn't pull off the win. Even though he was probably the victim of an umpire who couldn't actually see anything by that point. (I wasn't sure if the ump/scorer was blinking so much because he was getting sleepy, or he just had bad night vision.)

There are frequent asides in between innings. Two children of one player wondering why these adults care so much when they're not actually any good. An elderly man who has probably been coming to this field for decades, explaining to the mother of the children that you don't eat pizza at ballgames, and why do they need a school anyway? The kids can get experience working at a ballgame, flipping burgers or selling hot dogs. Two stoners spend a couple of innings standing beyond the outfield fence, asking snide questions of one of the players.

All of them wander off into the wider world long before the game concludes. It was just a temporary diversion, and once they got bored, or cold, or hungry, they decided to find something else to do. The only ones left were the players, and even if the winners are too weary to really celebrate, their dugout is significantly more talkative afterward than the losers. They're tired, they're sore, some of them will be hungover tomorrow. Some of them are already hungover. But hey, they won. If this is the end, they go out on top.