'Eephus': How can you not be romantic about baseball?

by Mitchel Green - March 29, 2025

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

So many baseball films are sentimental, nostalgic for a past that probably never existed and certainly won’t return if it did. It’s easy to see why. Baseball is a game we come to as children; it captures our imaginations, and it never lets go. It has created some of the last great American myths — heroes and villains, good and evil, the haves and the have-nots. Of all major professional American sports, it is the one most tied to teams’ specific communities, and so it becomes part of people’s identities in the way religion does. No wonder we want to look at the sport with such fondness. What sets “Eephus” apart is not just its deeply rooted melancholy, but its assertion that melancholy is crucial to the game. We all know the game will end at some point, but the beautiful thing about baseball is we don’t know when that’s going to be.

The powers that be in the sport have been doing everything they can to steal that time with the game away from us. Whether that be the implementation of a pitch clock designed to entice ever-dwindling TV viewers at the expense of the ballpark experience — a move so callous that baseball has genuinely felt like a different sport over the last few seasons — or a rule that puts a runner on second in extra innings in a desperate attempt to end the game everyone paid to see, or moving teams from cities where they have cultural roots to cities where the only culture is that there is no culture. I don’t mean to sound like a traditionalist when it comes to the sport, I’ve spent a lot of time doing sports analytics in a post-Moneyball world, but there are things we lose when we disregard the most traditional of American games.

It’s a shame that baseball is losing the languid pace that sets it apart from the intensity of football or basketball. Capturing this slowness is “Eephus”`s greatest achievement. Like a real game, it allows us time to know the players’ strengths and weaknesses, both on the field and off. The actual timing and result of the game don’t matter — you get an idea of how far into the game they are and what the score is, but it's not where your attention is focused, at least not until the final inning. As the happy-to-be-there benchwarmer says, “I’m looking around for something to happen, and poof the game’s over.” Everybody loves a big highlight play, but the lack of action is where baseball finds itself. It’s listening to the radio broadcasters — the great orators of the last century — riff in between pitches, enlightening listeners and crafting the narratives we pass down through generations. It’s the invigorating and banal conversations you have with friends and strangers that only break when the ball is in play. It’s the drunken camaraderie that develops over a long afternoon heckling your opponents, chanting for your favorite players, and singing your team’s song when they win.

Do the people trying to change baseball for a younger, less patient, shorter attention span generation feel any guilt about fundamentally altering the game? Probably not, so long as money keeps lining their pockets, but a character in “Eephus” gives me hope that maybe these decisions are gnawing at people's consciences. Graham, a member of one of the rec league teams in the film, is heading the school construction project that will destroy the field on which they’ve played so many classics. The game is dying from self-interested parties within the game itself. It no longer carries the cultural cachet it once did, and it likely never will again. But that’s fine. There are still people who care, and they care deeper than anyone who doesn’t care could ever know. We see that in “Eephus” whenever characters who are uninvolved with the game express their disinterest, their distaste for a sport they don’t understand. Baseball people can be a bit snobbish when it comes to explaining the game to newcomers, sure, but it’s because the game doesn’t need explaining. You either get it, or you don’t. It’s a common language that binds those who speak it for eternity. Sporting, political, or economic forces be damned, we will still love the game because it is sacred to us. So few things are these days.