A New Kind of Baseball On Film
on EEPHUS, dir. Carson Lund | showing in Belfast and Portland
You have a chance to win 2 free tickets to EEPHUS…at the bottom of this post!
Welcome to the first edition of our long-form essay series, helmed by writer and cinephile Kyle Manning. When I asked Kyle to do some writing for The Maine Playweek, I mentioned that EEPHUS could be an interesting subject and he lit up— baseball on film was one of his niche interests! EEPHUS is having a successful theatrical run right now, selling out cinemas across New England and hosting lively Q&As with the film’s director, Carson Lund and other cast and crew. The film is playing in only two venues in Maine (so far), so grab a buddy, make a plan, and see this excellent home-grown indie film. –Julia Dunlavey, founder of The Maine Playweek
EEPHUS will be showing at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine on Wednesday, March 26, 2025.
EEPHUS is also now showing at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast, Maine. Daily showtimes until Thursday, March 27.
It was inevitable that, at some point, baseball and cinema would come together in a big way. Both the art and the sport began to take shape in the latter half of the nineteenth century and found their stride at the beginning of the twentieth; they soon became major aspects of American life, its culture and economy. Baseball began to appear tangentially in early Hollywood films, such as The Cameraman in 1928 in which Buster Keaton mimes both sides of the game in an empty Yankee Stadium. In just one scene we can see how well Keaton’s American audience would have known the sport, as he plays off the assumption that they would not only recognize the stadium on sight but the specifics of the game itself.
Baseball continued to appear frequently in popular Hollywood films for the next several decades; but it wasn’t until the 1980s, when the modern blockbuster took shape, that we began to see films like Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984) which decidedly put the power of film and the elegance of baseball together to create an American fantasy. In the film, Robert Redford plays a sort of phantom, an errant nobody who seems to have been wandering the countryside with nothing but a baseball bat since the nation’s founding. His ‘natural’ talent is soon discovered by big league scouts, thrusting him into the game where he struggles at first but eventually succeeds.
The film’s soaring theme and impeccable cinematography captured the best parts of baseball and supersized them, providing a viewing experience that was equal parts boyhood dream and middle-aged wish fulfillment that was made to resonate with generations of Americans both young and old. Seeing The Natural’s success, Hollywood proceeded to cash in throughout the next decade, producing such family-friendly films as Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and A League of Their Own. They soon widened in scope as writers and producers shoe-horned baseball into every genre from the rom-com (Fever Pitch) to the supernatural thriller (Frequency). Baseball became a different kind of field for the movie industry, on which writers, directors, and actors could play out a variety of dramas while the presence of the sport itself could be relied on to draw in crowds.
The well of goodwill, however, soon dried up. By the early 2000s, most movies about baseball were no longer nostalgia-driven reflections on America’s pastime; and by the 2010s, they practically didn’t exist at all. The last truly successful one of its kind was 2011’s Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, which is a long stretch from the baseball films of the 80s and 90s. It’s a low-key character drama that finds its raison d’etre in the modern changes that have affected and frustrated the sport—a distinctly modern film for a modern audience. This shift in baseball’s cultural position could be linked to a litany of external changes, including the expanding global market, which would find a film about baseball to be as attractive as blatant American cultural propaganda. Occasionally a star such as Pitt will get something through the door, while the days of outright American fantasies, appeals to exceptionalism and nostalgia, have since passed.
The retreat of baseball from the realm of collective interest might have its benefits. I do not think a film such as Eephus, directed by Carson Lund and released this year by Music Box Films, would have come to light if the sport had still been a lucrative subject for the international blockbuster. Eephus is a tiny film, beginning and ending on a quiet day in autumn on a small-town playing field in New England. Two teams of middle-aged men have come together to play the final game of the fall ball season; despite everything from cantankerous umpires to encroaching darkness, they are determined to finish. And that’s it—no roaring crowds, no miracles, not a single grand-slam home run.
But unlike most movies that take baseball for their subject, Eephus has a very strong idea of what beauty might be and where it might be found. The bright leaves of autumn in New England flare in the background of nearly every scene, and there are several moments throughout the film when the camera seems to be distracted by the day’s quiet beauty, interrupted only by the occasional crack of a bat. The players themselves are sources of aesthetic interest, as they sport a variety of vintage uniforms and facial hair that might have been ripped straight from a baseball playing card, with the field and the dugout acting as their collective canvas. And like a real ball game, the film does not shy away from grittiness: it revels in the sound of cleats digging into clay, in the scratch of a pencil on the score sheet. The frame is filled with the dry orange color of the field and the rough textures of the dugout.
Eephus is still a film powered by nostalgia, even if its focus is so much smaller than that of films like The Natural. The world around the game, set sometime in the 90s, seems to be entirely at peace; the only signs of modern technology are the players’ vehicles, which do less to remind us of modernization and more to flaunt the aesthetics of a better time. For a certain generation, it is calling back to a period of childhood. (I could easily imagine my father as one of the men on the field, or even as one of the umpires, struggling to finish the game so that he could get home for dinner.) Like all of these movies about baseball, it’s looking backward; it’s turning the past into something beautiful by evoking memories in the present.
Perhaps this makes Eephus guilty of a hurtful mentality which has pervaded these stories—a longing for the past that risks our society’s health in the present. What liberates this movie, I think, is its willingness to depict characters who are no better nor more glorious because they existed in the past. Early on in Eephus, we learn that the field on which the action takes place will soon be paved over to make way for a new public school; in a different film—perhaps one aimed towards a wider audience and trying to pull on the greatest number of heartstrings—this might have been more of an animating principle, the inspiration for a contrived plot about a league of players raising the support necessary to save the field. In Eephus, however, the men aren’t here to put up a fight. They express their dissatisfaction and desire to keep playing ball, but only to themselves, in the form of complaints meant to go unheard. The film goes through pains to show that these are normal people, not at all different from the men in your own life who would spend a Sunday drinking beer and playing ball. They accept the arrival of the future with a shrug—and in the meantime, they’re going to finish playing their game.
This becomes the animating principle of the film, the players’ struggle simply not to leave before the game is over. We watch as the inconsistencies of daily life creep onto the field—families and arguments and bodily failures, to name a few—drawing these men away from the commitment they made to their team and to themselves. Aside from appreciating its nostalgia and particular ideas of beauty, watching Eephus might remind viewers how community tends to work in general—how there is never pot of gold at the end, how no one is ever going to agree completely, and how the only way to make something happen is to show up and see it through.
I’m not saying that movies like Eephus are going to help craft a new generation of community-minded young people. Young people need their own films, and Eephus probably isn’t one of them. But it is a place for today’s grown-up audiences—and not just the sports-enamored—to find the real struggles of their lives put to screen in an elegant and beautiful form. Few films have the audacity and courage to settle with the banal stakes of an unexceptional community that, once it’s gone, will leave nothing but sentimental effects on its characters. These are the stakes that most of us face on a day-to-day basis: the choice of whether to go out and be a part of something or not. Life will go on either way, for better or for worse.
Just in time for MLB's opening day, score two tickets to the New England baseball film EEPHUS at your preferred local Maine cinema-- SPACE Gallery or the Colonial Theatre!
CHOOSE YOUR SCREENING:
📆 Wednesday, March 26 at 7pm
📍 SPACE Gallery, Portland
😎 Director Carson Lund in attendance!
OR
📆 Now showing (through Thursday, March 27)
📍 Colonial Theatre, Belfast
HOW TO ENTER THE TICKET GIVEAWAY:
⚾️ Subscribe to The Maine Playweek email newsletter (sign-up below!) and follow us on Instagram if you use it (@themaineplayweek).
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