‘Eephus’ Review: One Last Game

This is by no means a rule, but anecdotally, there’s something about the sport of baseball that seems to attract hardcore cinephiles. Perhaps it’s because watching baseball, like watching a movie, is more or less the act of observing time pass. (And eating popcorn, or hot dogs.) Perhaps it’s because the sweeping arc of the baseball season, cut nearly into daily chunks by virtue of the number of games in a regular season, lends itself to slow-developing drama, a gradual tension build that echoes across eras and can twist itself into new shapes at any time. Also, a baseball player can have a longer career than athletes playing many other major American sports; with the greats, it’s easy to start writing some kind of epic biopic in your head.

I was raised a Red Sox fan (which I now bravely admit in the hometown New York paper, and pray for mercy). I came of age just as the team finally beat the so-called Curse of the Bambino. In those moments, it felt as if we’d reached the peak of some majestically rising action — that we were all players, somehow, in the grand story.

All this to say: “Eephus,” the feature directorial debut from Carson Lund, is a movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well. It’s set in the small town of Douglas, Mass., about half an hour’s drive south of Worcester and an hour from central Boston. It’s October, some time in the 1990s. The trees are hitting their peak colorful beauty, and baseball season is coming to an end.

But this is not a film about the Sox, nor is it, at least on its face, about anything epic at all. In fact, that MLB team barely comes up at all, though Bill Lee, a.k.a. “Spaceman,” the famous left-handed pitcher who played for Boston in the 1970s, portrays a minor character in the movie. Instead, the drama centers on two recreational baseball teams who’ve met up at Soldier’s Field for the very last game this diamond will see.

In a sly twist on genre convention — the small town folk trying to save a beloved public space because some terrible mean rich guy is going to build a mall on it, or something — the reason Soldier’s Field is going away is that they’re building a school on it. A public school. Its proximity to people’s homes will make life easier for every parent in this town. How dare they, right?