REVIEW. EEPHUS: A Eulogy for Baseball and the Passing of time.

It's Sunday, October 16, somewhere in a small New England town (the movie was filmed at Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts) sometime in the 1990s, and the final amateur baseball game between Adler's Paint (AP) and the Riverdogs is about to get underway. It's the final game because the field is being demolished to make way for a new school.

The foliage is in full autumnal technicolor: the days growing shorter, the nights getting colder or, as Yogi Berra might have quipped, "It's geting late early."

Such is the setting for Carson Lund's elegaic treatise on life and baseball, a little gem of a film - dare I say a diamond in the rough? - called Eephus, named after a unique and rarely used baseball pitch known for its extremely slow speed and unusually high trajectory. Meant to trick batters into swinging by throwing off their timing, the eephus - or "nothing pitch" as it is sometimes called - was developed by Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell in the 1940s and, except for a home run famously hit off that pitch by Ted Williams in the 1946 All-Star game, Sewell claimed he never gave up a home run whenever he threw an eephus.

During one of the movie's many dugout exchanges, a younger player for the AP's named Cooper "Coop" Bassett (Connor Marx) observes that throwing an eephus is "Like baseball, you look around for something to happen, and then the game's over."

Kind of like life, too, and Lund's screenplay (co-written with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher), doesn't miss one iota of that metaphor: Eephus is a beautifully crafted script that interweaves themes about life and baseball with the inevitable passing of time. The movie is bookended with audio of Lou Gehring's heartbreaking July 4,1939 farewell speech at Yankee stadium echoing in a kind of ethereal voiceover, and then punctuated throughout by a church bell ominously chiming as time passes during these final nine innings.

As the game progresses, we follow along by looking at the scorecard meticulously kept by Franny (Cliff Blake), who has set up a card table and folding chair behind the home plate fencing. Franny serves as the quintessential baseball fan from another time. Not only does he observe the game (he eventually gets pulled in to serve as home plate umpire), but all the time he never misses a play, carefully recording every strikeout, every walk, every base hit.

I couldn't help but wonder: How many people keep score at a baseball game today? Last year, while attending a Cleveland Guardians game, a young man sitting behind me leaned over and asked what I doing. When I told him I was keeping, score, his face scrunched up, "You can do that in baseball?" God, I felt old. Guess it's just time passing.

Into this off-kilter world of aging men, smoking and drinking beer while exchanging jabs and jokes and playing a nineteenth-century pastoral game, we observe more than just balls and strikes, although there are plenty of those, along with clumsy errors, stolen bases, missed calls by the umpire and balls that disappear into the autumn clouds.

We hear snippets of conversations between various players, sometimes even heated disagreements about the game, their kids, their future. For some, life has become a kind of monotonous routine, with baseball the one spark in an otherwise mundane existence. For others, each day is a reminder of dreams lost, chances not taken, hopes still unrealized. To add to the movie's ordinariness and to stay away from the usual hero/enemy face-off often a staple in sports movies, Lund has cast a mostly unknown group of actors, even giving sixty-two year old perennial supporting actor/ bit player Keith William Richards (playing umpire Ed Mortanian) his first starring role. The result is a true ensemble of regular team players and a few second-stringers, adding a refreshing authenticity to the movie and the game.

One particularly gruff Riverdog named Rich (Ray Hryb), sits in the dugout and rattles off a string of everyday activities to any teammates listening - picking up the kids from school, going to the grocery story, cutting the lawn - calling each one "combat," before talking about visiting the nursing home where his 90-year-old grandmother is dying, and calling that "love."

The Riverdogs starting pitcher (actually their only pitcher, as there almost aren't enough players to start the game), is a rubbery-faced redhead named Troy (David Pridemore), who initially comes off as a cross between real life Detroit Tigers' pitcher Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, fictional firearm Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins in Bull Durham) and Max Patkin, once known as the "Crown Prince of Baseball." Every time he winds up to pitch, it's unclear whether he is getting ready to fly, imitate a helicopter or pitch. Later, as the game wears on, his age and fatigue get the better of him, and he isn't sure he can continue to play.

When one player quips midgame, "There's nothing more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat guy thrown out stealing second," you know you're experiencing more than standard sports flick. Eephus plays like a finely written short story, utilizing quick, but efficient character development and strong imagery about the movement of time, combining humor and slapstick with more probing topics about life choices and living in the moment. And we see the game from every angle: behind home plate, over the left field fence, from the mound, at eye level as a player steals second, looking down on the field from a sun-streaked October sky.

Lund & Co. intersperses Eephus with quotes about baseball wisdom from famous players: Satchel Paige's philosophy of pitching ("Keep the ball away from the bat"), and famous movie lines from baseball flicks like 1988's Bull Durham ("Strikeouts are fascist"), but never once does the movie use those quotes as filler or simply for effect. Each quote is strategic - and strategically placed - to emphasize another point the movie is making about baseball, time, or or the existential essence of life. The characters not only become vehicles for Lund's message, they also emerge fully human and fully realized through the rules of the game. It's really a masterfully told story with layer upon layer of meaning.

Eephus may not be your thing if you don't like or appreciate baseball as America's pastime. Lund's allegorical story isn't only for the baseball connoisseur, but it probably helps if you know something about the game, or are at least willing to explore a story ripe with other meaning, one that is ribald one minute and touching the next. When a pizza truck pulls up and the owner begins selling slices at the game (a charming cameo by former Boston Red Sox - and Cleveland Indians - sports announcer Joe Costiglione), an elderly patron refuses to partake, claiming pizza doesn't belong at a baseball game. Only hot dogs and beer.

As I watched Eephus, I kept thinking about my dad, who played amateur baseball into his seventies: how he would have loved this movie and the gritty reality with which it examines amateur baseball in a small American town, how he would have understood male relationships bonded through sports, and how we would have talked afterward about baseball, life, and most importantly, the passing of time.

I was in my mid-twenties when my dad died days shy of his 81st birthday, but I can still remember his street-smart sense about life and his ability to connect movie themes with his own experiences. We had numerous conversations after going to the movies together, everything from Kim Darby's persistence in the original True Grit (1969), which he likened to what he saw as undeniable internal fortitude in me (as a pre-adolescent, I remember being stunned by his assessment), to the final film we watched together, 1982's On Golden Pond, where, once again, we found common ground discussing father-daughter relationships.

So it was not without a tear that I watched the credits role as Tom Waits sang, "Ol' 55," where "time went so quickly, I went licky-splitly / out to my Ol' 55."

And I kept thinking, where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

*******

Eephus has played in limited theatrical release throughout the spring and summer. It is available to stream on Prime Video and AppleTV.