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“Field of Dreams in Reverse”: Baseball Movies, Eephus and One Last Game in East River Park
Eephus “We called it Field of Dreams in reverse: if you wreck it, they will leave,” writer and actor Nate Fisher told me of the selling pitch for Eephus, the melancholic baseball comedy he co-wrote with Michael Basta and director Carson Lund, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last Fall after debuting at Cannes, 2024. (The film is currently in theatrical release from Music Box.)
The unusual baseball film captures the last recreation-league baseball game played at a soon-to-be-demolished field in a deliberately ambiguous New England location, carried out by two teams—the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint—over the course of one long, surreal day.
The day before its New York Film Festival premiere last October, the cast and crew of Eephus gathered for a scrimmage baseball game at Field 6 in East River Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The location itself was fortuitous: Field 6, like all of the public sport fields at the Robert Moses-designed East River Park, is, like its cinematic counterpart, also scheduled for imminent demolition. (It’s part of the city’s East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a long-gestating plan to build a barrier between the East River and the residents of the Lower East Side following the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.) A meandering, riverside affair executed amidst the din of an active construction zone, the game was called sometime around the eighth inning, by which point it had descended into more of a pre-premiere hangout than a contest with clear winners and losers. Occasionally, a foul ball would fly at the stands, and we’d duck and recoil before returning to our conversations. Fashion designer and local celebrity Wayne Diamond—whose memorable appearance mid-way through Eephus comes courtesy of Uncut Gems co-star Keith William Richards—held court from the second bench overlooking right field, at one point declaring, “I hate fucking baseball.”
In New England baseball lore, the infamous Curse of the Bambino, begat by the Red Sox’s decision to trade Babe Ruth to the Yankees, seemingly plagued the franchise—and the city—for 86 years, preventing them from securing a pennant. When Fisher and I met to discuss Eephus, he spoke at length about the sport’s peculiarities and charms, the superstitions it engenders even in otherwise rational people, its “bizarre and preposterous” rules, and the surreality of watching a game in which “there’s always a chance you will see something that you’ve never seen before.”
The film’s odd title — and chief central metaphor — comes from a fabled baseball pitch: an extremely rare curveball that is so slow it lingers in the air seemingly forever, confusing the batter. Believed to derive from the Yiddish word for “nothing,” the pitch, like so much baseball lore and history, feels insular, steeped in history and ritual; it’s explained in a memorable monologue by Fisher’s character, who notes that the pitch is like baseball itself, because “as you’re looking around for something to happen, the game’s over.”
There’s no shortage of baseball movies, but few feel as invested in capturing the sheer peculiarity of a sport steeped in mysticism—and with such a sense of humor—as Eephus, a film that relishes in the marginal activities of a baseball game, which serves as both backdrop and framing device. “It’s standing around, talking and doing nothing,” Fisher explained of their approach on how to make a baseball game cinematic. “And when you do nothing, spontaneous, weird shit starts to happen…the standing around lets the mind wander and invites space for contemplation or saying something really stupid.”
At one point in our discussion, Fisher paraphrased an observation by sports documentarian Jon Bois, a particular influence: “You know, that’s the thing about baseball: it’s just not that fun.”
Finally: a baseball film that captures just how unpleasant watching baseball can truly be.
The sport faces plenty of existential threats in the 21st century, including the gradual loss of public recreational space; declining viewership; low, exploitative wages in the (shrinking) minor leagues, which are controlled by a sporting league uniquely exempt from antitrust laws and primarily invested in corporate profit; and the gradual loss of the sport’s moniker as “America’s pastime.” Together they have made baseball something of a fading institution. Fitting, then, that the disembodied voice of sociological documentarian—and New England royalty—Frederick Wiseman presides over Eephus, reciting pithy quotes about the game.
Set in some vague, 20th century past — most likely the 1990s — the world of Eephus foretells baseball’s imminent decline, imbuing the film with a lingering sense of melancholy. Intended to “look like a John Ford movie,” it blends screwball patter with sobering, wide shots of its doomed field, the increasingly maudlin dugout, and the creepy, autumnal woods beyond. To capture the hangout environment, the filmmakers broke up the script with improvised snippets of “Altman-type dialogue,” instructing the cast to stand around a boom mic and yell into it for five minutes. Characters were plotted out by position, then given personality types based on those positions: archetypes became men of different ages and backgrounds, developed through their clusters and cliques, as well as the dynamics of the baseball field.
Older players lament their physical limitations, including weight gain and bad knees and herniated disks. An elderly man watches the game from the stands, because he has nowhere else to be.
As the game drags on, with characters pulled between completing play and real-life obligations, it becomes a sport of endurance, as well as a fight against futility, a feeling well-known to baseball fans pulled between triumph and heartbreak. Intrepid fans of the New York Mets, who last year entered the offseason but fell short of the World Series, rally around the pithy phrase, “Ya Gotta Believe,” even in the face of total blowout, relying on a series of odd good luck charms and gimmicks and slogans to garner success.
“All sports fandom is very suffering oriented, but for whatever reason, I think baseball fandom is the one that’s the most cosmic and curse-based,” Fisher explained.
The filmmakers have cited Tsai Ming-Liang’s ghostly elegy Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), which soberly captures the final screening at a haunted Taipei movie theater, as a particular influence on the film. “No one comes to the movies anymore, and no one remembers us anymore,” Jun Shi, one of the actors from Dragon Inn (1967), the film being shown in that Taipei theater, tells his co-star, who also attends the screening. In Eephus, once the players leave the field, their legacy is erased forever, and no one, save each other, will remember their toil, nor the companionship it offered. “I can’t quit this field,” a character admits towards the end of a game, submerged in darkness, long after others have been pulled away, jeopardizing play. Once he leaves, no one beyond his former teammates will remember—or care—that he’s gone.
It’s an unusual framework for a “baseball movie,” a subgenre that comes with a lot of mileage, and a lot of self-mythologizing. One of the oldest sports in the Americas, baseball is older than the moving image, uniquely positioning it as a crucial part of 20th century mass culture and American identity. Cinema history is filled with tributes to the sport, from the cloying religiosity of Angels in the Outfield (1951) to the masculine pomp of The Natural (1984) to the nostalgia bait of the ‘90s, like A League of Their Own (1992) and The Sandlot (1993), at the height of the sport’s “Steroid Era,” to the number-crunching austerity of Moneyball (2011). In fact, Eephus opens with Franny (Cliff Blake), an old-timer who keeps the game score, quoting, to an audience of none, the famous words of New York Yankees’ first baseman, Lou Gehrig, memorialized by Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees (1942): “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Baseball movies tend to depict games as triumphant, rousing affairs with nail-biting tension, dogged heroes, and operatic arcs, reconfiguring the stately pace of play with ellipsis and rapid-fire editing. These artistic liberties feel comically divorced from the reality of actually watching the game, which—until the introduction of the 30-second “pitch clock” into Major League Baseball last year, intended to quicken the pace of play for audiences with increasingly short attention spans—had no time limits on play. Players, if they even make it to professional leagues, can toil in the minors for years—in an exploitative system The American Prospect once likened to “indentured servitude”—and are often forced to take other jobs to supplement their paltry income.
“Baseball is a very arcane and silly thing that you almost need to call attention to it,” Fisher told me, explaining how they envisioned the film in relation to the canon. “That’s what some baseball movies don’t really do: they’re too reverent.”
Field of Dreams (1989), the prototypical, Kevin Costner-starring baseball film, which is just about as reverent as it gets, looms large over Eephus. Characters seem to drift onto—and back off—the field, abutted by dense woods, much like the ghostly visitors in Costner’s cornfield, which he turns into a baseball field for the ghosts of baseball past. In Eephus, the field is also haunted by the past, but unlike its cinematic forefather, it’s doomed in the future, a plot inspired by the move of Fisher’s hometown team, the Pawtucket Red Sox, or “PawSox,” to Worcester, leaving their stadium in Providence abandoned for several years. (In another odd form of kismet that postdates the film, the town is now tearing it down to make way for a new high school).
One of the ghosts that wanders into the film is an “old timer” played by Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a legendary left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in the 1970s, whose own cult of personality—including his love of philosophy and vocal advocacy for the legalization of pot—made him something of a folk figure over the years, particularly to baseball fans in New England. Crucially, he was known for his own iteration of the “eephus pitch,” the “Leephus.” He emerges from the woods to wax poetic about his own time, pitches, then returns to the woods, disappearing from the film, and the match, entirely; a specter passing beyond the veil. The viewer wonders if he was ever really there at all.
“We really wanted them to feel like people in the process of becoming ghosts, rather than in Field of Dreams, [where] it’s ghosts in the process of becoming people,” Fisher explained.
A different Costner baseball movie also lends its influence: Bull Durham (1988), a sex comedy set in the comparatively unglamorous world of minor league baseball, about an aging pitcher whose career is behind him tasked with preparing a hotshot young pitcher for the majors. He’s cranky, brash, and a total washed-up loser, best served by abandoning baseball together. “It’s not [about] the lives of the ultra talented, professional baseball players,” Fisher explained of the film’s particular appeal. “It’s people that are hitting .250 trying to hit .300 so that they can play in Yankee Stadium for two weeks.”
Additionally, Fisher cited the comedic influence of HBO cult series Eastbound & Down (2009), a cult HBO series created by Ben Best, Jody Hill, and Danny McBride, which follows an egotistical baseball burnout (McBride) who is forced to move back to his hometown after his professional career sputters, delivering matter-of-fact lines like, “Fundamentals are a crutch for the talentless.”
Eephus showcases the losers who stay nobodies, toiling for the pure love of the game, without glitzy contracts or promises to play in massive stadiums.
When the Eephus cast scrimmage finally concluded, as day transformed into night, the season’s first real chill settled over the field. As in the film, passersby stopped to watch, grew bored and left; other sporting groups showed up to use the field, only to be turned away; and the crew constantly improvised, pulling new players from the bleachers, encouraging one another and shit-talking in equal turns.
Ironically, the existential feel to the scrimmage led me back to Field of Dreams and its famous monologue by the late James Earl Jones, apt for watching a game on a field set to be demolished for a film about a game on a field set to be demolished: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball…it has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
The final score was 15-14, to the River Dogs.
