Baseball and America in Eephus

“What always draws me to a film idea is location, mood, and light,” says Carson Lund. In his directorial debut Eephus it’s a soon-to-be bulldozed baseball field in Douglas, Massachusetts where a hodgepodge of Rec league baseball players try to finish their final game before the sun sets. Carson co-wrote the film with Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, bringing one of the biggest hits to the Director’s Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival this year. I talked to Carson and Nate about making one of the best sports films in recent memory. 

Eephus follows in the tradition of great baseball movies — “baseball is the most cinematic sport because at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of people standing around,” Nate says — but its hilarious and bittersweet melancholy charmed baseball lovers and agnostics alike. While Carson is a lifelong baseball fan Nate came to the sport later in life, to the benefit of the script as Carson recounts it. “To discover a passion for a sport at this point in life, you have a different view of it. He finds a lot of things about it absurdist that I hadn’t even thought are funny because they are just so familiar to me. I liked the idea of working with someone who could defamiliarize this milieu that I am a part of.” The collaboration came from a place of diving into baseball’s nuances with hopes of reaching something universal, an approach that proved successful and created a story that is uniquely representative of the current moment in American culture.

“I enjoy being bored by baseball”

-Nate Fisher

Carson comes from a background of cinematography, and the brilliance of his collaboration with Eephus’ cinematographer, Greg Tango, ties together their formal choices with the central metaphor of the film: “I knew I wanted to make a film about day tracking into night and capture all those delicate gradations… that’s how we landed on this baseball game.” As the sunlight goes out on the field and the men play their last game, so too is the light going out on communities just like theirs all over the country. The anachronistic production design, full of vintage radios and old cars, evokes a time and place that feels familiar but has been lost in a digital age where similar camaraderie mostly happens on the internet. “We used to get so mad when we called tech support at how unhelpful the people were. Now you’re just begging to talk to a person,” Nate joked to me. “With the internet we’ve literally built the Tower of Babel… we have ruined communication forever by doing too much of it, and now we’re fucked. I felt that a lot too.”

Eephus is slow and ruminative, mimicking the meandering feeling of watching a baseball game and giving way to the incredibly well-realized ensemble of characters created by the writing team. Between moments of the characters hurling personal insults at each other and griping about the field being flattened to build a school, the film lets the audience sit in the moments of stillness and rewards patience – not unlike baseball itself. Carson loved the idea of a structuralist film – “in this case it’s 9 innings, and when the game is over it’s over.”  The film doubles down on that idea by embodying the essence of what makes the sport so uniquely entertaining and frustrating. Nate and Carson both lamented the recent addition of a timed pitch clock in baseball that was implemented to speed the game up – a last gasp to try and save the relevance of a sport many claim to be dying. But the “purgatorial state” of baseball, as Carson describes it, is a design, not a flaw. Eephus perfectly captures it. 

“To me it’s sad and it’s indicative of this idea that everything needs to be on a clock, everything needs to move quickly and not bore people and cater to the widest possible audiences instead of the real tradition of this game and the way it’s played and the culture. It feels reflective of a wider shift away from cultural uniqueness and flavor. That’s why I wanted to make a film that shows the viewer what baseball really should feel like”

-Carson Lund

Nate quoted sports documentarian John Bois to me when describing that feeling: “That’s the thing about baseball, it’s just not that fun.” Bois’ films have similarly engrossed audiences, magnifying the intricacies and absurdities of sports, and you can feel the influence of his quirks and humor in Nate’s writing. There may be some truth to that idea of baseball not being fun, and a lot of the sport requires long periods of waiting for something exciting to happen, but Eephus grasps what makes it so special anyways. The magic of baseball is captured through the time spent sitting in dugouts, the mystical superstitions that become self-fulfilling prophecies, and the magic of a community that only makes total sense to the people in it. 

Franny, a scorekeeper turned makeshift umpire who meticulously takes notes in a scorebook as the game goes on, is the film’s heart and perfectly encapsulates that singular charm of America’s pastime. Carson described the character as “ a tribute to people who find such meaning in these trivial details… It’s totally meaningless to an outsider but so important to him.” 

“The communities you choose to build and the communities you voluntarily entered into, you can drink the Kool-Aid and buy into it.”

-Nate Fisher

Eephus is an exercise in describing the indescribable and showing the beauty in something that seems mundane from the outside. Though the film is structured like a baseball game, all of that falls away to focus on what is important: the people who are playing it. Nate told me that in writing the film they focused on “the communities you choose to build and the communities you voluntarily enter into.” That’s the magic of baseball and the magic of Eephus, and for one fleeting night in Massachusetts, the baseball game seems to be all that matters. 

In baseball’s dying days its stories are like American myths, with Eephus weaving in quotes from legends like Hank Aaron and Yogi Berra that might as well have been from Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. The whole history of the sport plays out like folklore, right down to the famous (and likely false) creation myth that the sport was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York. The stories we tell about baseball often transcend its reality and offer an ineffable mysticism and intrigue in their half-truths. From the Bambino’s called shot to Doc Ellis’ no-hitter on LSD and all of the crazy pseudo-fables in between – the history of baseball is filled with unconfirmed legends that contribute to a labyrinthian history of interconnected tales. 

“We’re superstitious people because we’re baseball fans.”

Nate Fisher

Eephus falls right into baseball’s storytelling tradition and brings its own grandiose spirit of mythmaking. Nate recounted a bit of stranger-than-fiction lore from the set of the film when they had almost given up on finding a bunch of cars they needed for a scene. While drinking at the “only bar and grill in Douglas, Massachusetts” they met an old guy who claimed to have 20 cars in his garage that fit exactly what they needed. As the light dims on the baseball game and the field is lit up by those 20 cars, a towering pop fly goes missing in the night sky. It’s a moment that already feels like the embodiment of baseball myth even before Nate and Carson told me about a pickup baseball game between the cast and crew where baseballs similarly disappeared into the night sky. 

“We went to the one bar and grill in Douglas, Massachusetts and we met this old guy and we were talking to him. He said ‘Oh I’ve got 20 cars in my garage, I’ve got a Roadrunner, I’ve got a Ford Bronco, I’ve got this, I’ve got that.’ And we’re like ‘Can we use them?’ He says ‘Yeah sure.’”

-Nate Fisher

A bit later, the film lingers on a shot of the night sky before fading into a shot of Franny taking a leak out in the forest. It is a tacit acknowledgment of the seemingly other-worldly forces that give meaning and allure to the things that we love. A nod to the unexplainable and the extraterrestrial, a stroke of beauty that is both natural and supernatural. “It’s a pause for the audience to just look at the stars,” says Carson, “a reminder that there are bodily obligations. And Franny needs to go piss.” There is a clash of “the cosmos and the body; a distillation of baseball in the world of Eephus.

As Eephus is full of iconic baseball quotes I couldn’t help but be reminded of my favorite quote about the sport. American historian Jacques Barzun said in the 1950s, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” This idea is at the core of Eephus, with a community rec baseball league set to go the way of the dodo serving as a stand-in for the sport of baseball and perhaps the spirit of America itself. “We wanted to do a film about things getting worse because they are,” says Nate. “Things are always getting worse.” It’s not hard to project that idea onto the state of filmmaking as well. Nate and Carson both referenced Goodbye Dragon Inn, a Taiwanese film about the last movie being shown at a cinema that is about to close, as an inspiration for Eephus. 

As Nate lamented how things in the world are getting worse, he described making Eephus as a way of creating some productive output for thinking that the sky is falling – “That way it’s not just you screaming into the void.” And it is no surprise after talking to Nate and Carson that the film is poignant and hopeful in spite of the world that surrounds it. The final game at Soldiers Field comes to an end hilariously and unceremoniously, and perhaps the only way that it could have, on a walk-off walk. And the characters go their separate ways as if it might be the last time they ever see each other. 

We’re left with Franny to see over the final moments of the field. The keeper of records and de facto historian is left in the press box as the last person to preside over the now-empty field. The film ends with one final quote from baseball history, concluding with a perfect note of optimism. “You’ve gotta figure out how to make the best of it,” Nate told me, “that’s what this movie is about I suppose.” What can we do as things change and the world around us ceases to exist as we once knew it?  “What the hell else are you supposed to do,” says Nate. “You must go on.”