Eephus Film Review: Last at Bat

In this funny, scruffy, sometimes mournful indie, an amateur baseball league plays its last game before their home field is set to be demolished. That “last day at Soldiers Field” plot point is revealed two minutes in, dispatched via a radio newscast casually running over the opening credits (voiced by nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a fun cameo). In fact, the news flies by so fast, you might miss it, but the ball players’ distress about the field’s coming demise hangs over the whole film, coloring a perfect day at the park with growing melancholy.

Sharing some of the same talent behind last year’s microindie critic’s darling Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Eephus is suffused with a sincere love for baseball but not overburdened with holiness about the game. If you care about baseball, then you’ll get a kick out of the extended discussion about the titular pitch, which takes so long to cross the plate, batters lose the instinct for when to swing. If you don’t care about baseball, you’ll still get the thematic resonance. There’s no real plot, just one last game to be played, and it goes late into the evening. The pleasure is in the hang, enjoying the crack of the bat, the wisecracking between guys in the dugout on a perfect fall day in small-town Massachusetts. The humor and textured characterizations develop at their own easy gait: I smirked when I pieced together that the raggedy-looking guy sucking down a morning beer was the pitcher, and verily guffawed at an exchange he has with another ball player who’s clearly over his shit.

First-time feature director Carson Lund (who also co-wrote the script with Michael Basta and edited the film) cast a raft of interesting-looking character actors to play the two ball clubs, and they plausibly range from fit guys who look they could be playing AAA and been-around-the-block guys who look like they’re a Big Mac away from a massive coronary. The film is set in the Nineties – which, in a small town, might be confused for the Eighties – and there’s more texture to be had there: the retro boombox and uniforms, cigarettes casually smoked on the field, so many gnarly beards. The men belly-ache about their pains – bad knees and herniated discs and arms that wear out far faster then they used to – and they talk around, not about, their feelings, in an understated study of male communion.

The game keeps going and going, locked in a tie. Along with dusk, a gloom descends, and it dawns on these guys, many of whom are too old or too fat or too tired to find a new league in another town: This might be my last at bat. The energy leaks out of the game, and the movie, too, purposefully. Transferred as effectively to the audience as was the giddiness at game’s beginning: the feeling that something you’ve loved is on its way out.

Find movie times.

This article appears in March 21 • 2025.