Film Review: Eephus

The list of great sports cinema is littered with baseball films; from Bull Durham to Moneyball to Everybody Wants Some! and The Natural, nearly every decade of American cinema features at least one Great baseball film. The past decade-plus has even seen some fantastic baseball television series; Pitch, Brockmire, Eastbound & Down and Hot Stove League have all found expressive ways to explore the sport as metaphor, where it remains as popular a narrative device as any in the genre. None of those stories, however, are quite like Eephus, a baseball film that takes the quiet, religious reflections of sport and life found in the best of its genre, and crystallizes them into one of the most poignant, unassumingly reflective sport films in recent memory.

Carson Lund’s phenomenal directorial debut (he also pens the screenplay, alongside Michael Basta and Nate Fisher) begins on a seemingly random day, in a random October sometime in the 1990s, when two random groups of aging men – and Franny, their long-loyal scorekeeper – gather on a local New England field to play a game of baseball. Not just any game of baseball; the last game of baseball ever to be played on Soldiers Field, the local Douglas, Massachusetts field that serves as Eephus‘s proverbial cathedral, before it is razed and turned into a random part of a new middle school being built on its land.

Where these men came from, and how they came to play for the competing teams of Arlen’s Paint and the Riverdogs, is not of concern to Eephus; its players are aging plumbers, military veterans, fathers with disinterested children, and aging 20-somethings clinging to their nascent, though still palpable high school glory. After Franny arrives and sets up his old folding table to keep score, the players and umpires begin filtering into the field, Eephus nonchalantly just begins; the first pitches are thrown, and the film quickly goes to work easing its audience into the film’s unique, intimately understanding of playing, watching, and living baseball, delivered with such unassuming naturalism, it easily hides the more clockwork metaphorical devices embedded directly in the film’s text.

As the game works methodically works through each at-bat, Eephus slowly begins to layer in its themes and character, letting its attention shift between different perspectives, both on-field and off, as it introduces us to its cast of characters, and the nascent conflicts existing on both sides of the invisible foul lines of the community baseball diamond. Life happens around the game – a few skateboarders offer some light heckling, a mother comes to watch her husband with her disinterested children, an old man who proclaims he never loses sleep leaving a tie ball game – but much of Eephus‘s attention is spent on the meaningless pursuit of the community league’s final game, the swirl of sound and emotion quietly and slowly building itself into a Lynchian-like Zen state, where its small-town character and internal dramas become existential in their simplicity and lack of pretense.

There’s really a healthy amount of plot in Eephus, but the film expertly avoids pushing that into the text of its visuals or dialogue, which never waver in their depiction of the sport and its players, of their meaningless, sometimes reluctant pursuit of beauty – and most importantly, how meaningful it is for these characters to cross home plate, to truly come home, for one last time before their holy ground is forever desecrated (sacrificed by one of their own, it turns out, a Riverdogs player who is equally admonished by players from both teams). Eephus fills its space with lots of overlapping bits of background dialogue, sometimes paying attention to the action of a big hit or a defensive play – or sometimes, focusing on the reactions of players and the one or two fans in the crowd, the unforgettable sounds of ball meeting leather or wood crackling in the background as the film observes the movement of a first basemen from covering a baserunner to moving back to his defensive position, or the wordless reflections of a man, aging and fully in his thoughts, silently contemplating the inevitable passage of time as his back stiffens and his pitches slow down from inning to inning.

As the game continues on and the day grows longer, Eephus‘s name is given definition, and is briefly even seen when an elderly savant (someone who graced Soldiers Field three decades ago; played by infamous, outspoken former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, known for his unique interpretation of the titular pitch throughout the 1970s) takes the mound and gleefully shows off the pitch. For those unfamiliar, the eephus is a nothing but a strategic lob; a pitch thrown at a slow speed with a dramatic vertical flight path – as one character eloquently describes it, a pitch that appears to briefly become “lost in time” before fooling a pitcher, usually into watching the pitch go by, unable to appreciate it or swing at it before it’s already in the catcher’s glove.

That metaphor, though an obvious one, is the foundation the film is built upon; and with its incredibly talented cast, strictly comprised of character actors, newcomers, and Frederick frickin’ Wiseman, it shifts from personality to action to quiet shots of the field’s surrounding landscape with an almost chaotic grace, guided by Lund’s direction and Greg Tango’s cinematography, creating a warm, reflective aesthetic that’s both incredibly loose and impressively focused in its pursuit of truth, both on and off the field.

And like every game, every day, and every lifetime, Eephus eventually meanders its way into its ending – a hauntingly poignant sequence played in almost complete-dark, utilizing sources of light and the increasingly anonymous figures of its dusk adorned characters and their voices. It’s an incredibly challenging third act, one that could easily slip into saccharine self-indulgence, if put in the wrong creative hands. Thankfully, it isn’t – and while I won’t spoil the final plays of the final showdown between Arlen’s Paint and the Riverdogs, I will say I found myself pleasantly surprised, and a little moved, at how well the film pays off its final moments.

Eephus is most certainly a baseball film that won’t be for everyone; its relationship with plot is near combative at times, and its relentless adherence to its unique pursuit of sense and tone could read as navel-gazing… or just boring. But for those willing to open themselves to the beauty that is Eephus, a rewarding, indelibly resonant field awaits – not only one of the best films of 2025, but one of the best sport films of the decade, a film I can’t wait to revisit time and time again, to hear the sounds of Soldier Field’s unremarkable, legendary final game, and to join Franny in The Lou Gehrig Prayer (“Today… I consider myself… the luckiest man… man.. man…”) just one more time.

Grade: A