Controversially, the implementation of a pitch clock in 2023 effectively transformed the experience of both playing and watching major league baseball. By undermining the pitcher’s authority on how the innings flow, the timekeeper shortens a game’s duration.
Now, as filmmaker and recreational ballplayer Carson Lund points out, America’s pastime has become just another transactional activity — something you can schedule to get in and out of. A once leisurely sport has been forced to fit the demands of our hyperspeed culture.
“I find it cynical,” Lund, 33, tells me as we sit on a picnic table in Elysian Park across from a field with teenage boys at baseball practice. “At its purest, and the way it was for 100 years, baseball is a game that could take five, six hours if it had to. It created its own sense of time and theoretically could go on forever.”
The desire to portray baseball’s enrapturing quality propelled Lund to co-write and direct his debut feature, “Eephus” (now in theaters), an amusing and delightfully acted dramedy set in the 1990s about two adult recreational teams in suburban Massachusetts playing one last game before their local field is demolished and turned into a school.
From left, Cliff Blake, Tim Taylor, Jeff Saint Dic and Ethan Ward in the movie “Eephus.”
(Music Box Films)
As day turns into night, the men play on, never quite managing to express their shared sorrow over the loss, which yields both humor and pathos. Their friendships are bound by baseball and might not extend beyond the field, yet Lund thinks of these team-driven relationships as authentic, even if tenuous.
“You work through your feelings through the language of the game and competitive banter,” Lund says. “The banter in the film is very regional, feels like New England to me, a place where sports are so much a part of the culture that they’ve infused the vernacular.”
Lund says he never much cared for baseball movies. All of them, he thinks, lack the rhythms of the game because, as with a pitch clock, they are “ultimately subservient to the demands of Hollywood narratives.”
“They’re so often fixated on individuals who are going through some sort of transformation and the game is simply a metaphor for that,” explains Lund. “I wanted to immerse you in this single day on a single field and create a more collective experience with a large ensemble who are all dealing with the same thing, which is saying goodbye to a ritual, saying goodbye to a version of themselves that they create on that field together.”
Lund says his film is about “saying goodbye to a ritual.”
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
Lund’s approach to a deeply American subject involved pacing and formal choices that one might more often associate with European art films or even Asian “slow cinema.” Lund aimed to evoke the longing of Taiwan-based master Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” about the last showing at a movie theater about to close.
“I was interested in the bittersweet, funeral quality that suffuses Tsai’s film,” Lund says. “The films I love the most are the ones that privilege some degree of distraction or floating attention and allow you to luxuriate in the atmosphere.”
An avid cinephile whose broad smile often illuminates his face, Lund started watching Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman movies at a young age through his father’s recommendations. He’s especially confident when talking baseball. Lund found the ideal field for “Eephus” in the small city of Douglas, Mass., after visiting more than 100 diamonds across New England. “I wanted a field that felt like it had been degraded by time with old wood, chipped paint and a sense of history,” he says.
Since his cast of characters is, in his words, “over the hill” — adult men ranging from rusty to out of shape, in a recreational league where the stakes are as low as they can be — Lund could focus on conveying the feeling of community by embracing a bit of chaos and capturing the action in wide shots.
“I wanted to see the interaction between all these different bodies moving around and the distance between everyone,” he explains. “There are many qualities of baseball that aren’t shared by any other major sport. It’s very unique.”
A scene from the movie “Eephus.”
(Music Box Films)
Born into a Boston Red Sox-loving household, Lund grew up in Nashua, N.H., and played shortstop in a traveling league. His father, who played throughout his life until recently due to an ailing knee, encouraged Lund and his brother to do it out of love for the game, never as an obligation.
Lund played the coveted infield position in part because he looked up to Nomar Garciaparra, star player for the Red Sox in the late ’90s and early aughts.
Though he aspired to the majors, Lund eventually found the competitiveness among young men with similar ambitions too toxic. “I just stopped, which broke my dad’s heart,” he says. “I was more interested in exploring creative outlets.” A high school job at his local library fed Lund’s growing appetite for international cinema.
Moving to sunny Los Angeles, where the fervor for the Dodgers is palpable wherever you go, rekindled Lund’s fondness for the sport. For the last eight years he’s played recreationally in the Soldiers, a team that’s part of the Pacific Coast Baseball League. Some of his longtime Soldiers teammates were aware he was making a baseball movie, and they all attended the AFI Fest screening of “Eephus” in Hollywood in October.
“There’s no competition in this league,” Lund notes. “I found it very relaxing and joyful. It’s a sport, so you’re exerting yourself, but the meditative qualities of baseball really started to stand out to me. The qualities you see in the film.”
Though his heart belongs to the Red Sox, Lund moved to L.A. to make movies. “At Dodger Stadium you can watch the sunset over the mountains,” he says. “It’s a beautiful experience.”
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
For Lund, filmmaking has always been a team sport. The screenplay for “Eephus” emerged from the collaboration with childhood friend Michael Basta, part of the independent film collective Omnes Films with Lund, and Nate Fisher, with whom Lund first became acquainted while attending screenings at the Harvard Film Archive.
The writing started over Zoom at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with them asking each other what they would want to see in a baseball game. What archetypes would need to be included? That involved creating a box score, a visual map of the fictional game that would unfold throughout the film.
“Carson knew the game play, Nate knows fun, weird, trivial parts of baseball and I had the off-the-field stuff,” says Basta via Zoom. “It was a funny mix of different baseball minds.”
The trio first figured out what happened inning by inning. Once they had that structure, the process entailed discussing when and how to spend time with each of the characters without prioritizing one over another.
“It was about negotiating the push-pull between speed and stasis,” says Lund. “That’s what baseball’s all about. These long periods of nothing happening and then bursts of action. I wanted to tease out those passages of nothingness and show that there’s actually a lot happening.”
Cliff Blake in the movie “Eephus.”
(Music Box Films)
In turn, Fisher agreed to participate as long as he could cast himself playing a character based on his all-time favorite player, Zack Greinke, a prodigious pitcher known for his deadpan sense of humor and idiosyncratic personality. More importantly, Greinke still occasionally throws the archaic “eephus” pitch that lends the movie its title.
“We needed a guy to sit on the sideline and explain the whole theme of the movie in three minutes or less,” Fisher says during a video interview. “I gave that to myself because it’s really easy to act when you write your own lines. I hope [Greinke] gets to see this movie.”
As Fisher’s character, Merritt — who wears the number 21 like Greinke did when he played for Fisher’s beloved team, the Arizona Diamondbacks — puts it, the eephus is “a type of curve ball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter … makes him lose track of time.”
Notable among the many cast members is the voice of legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman (“Titicut Follies,” “Central Park”) as a radio announcer. Initially, Lund intended to have him play an on-camera role, but Wiseman’s advanced age — he is 95 — complicated his involvement. Lund would love to see the veteran nonfiction storyteller make one of his acclaimed observational works about baseball.
“It wasn’t just that I liked his voice,” Lund says about reaching out to Wiseman. “I felt that by putting him in the film, I was telling the audience that this is more of an anthropological film than it is a traditional narrative. It’s sort of a cue.”
Red Sox fans also will delight in a late cameo by Bill Lee, nicknamed “Spaceman,” an eccentric baseball luminary who, quite famously, also threw the eephus to catch people off guard. “Having his name attached helped us secure financing,” Lund recalls.
While none of the adult characters in “Eephus” serve as direct proxies for Lund (“If I were in the film, it would be a better shortstop,” he boasts, endearingly), he did find a way to obliquely put himself in the film. Halfway through the game, a kid and his father show up to practice but discover the field is occupied. It’s a brief but personally significant moment.
“It’s actually my dad playing the dad and the kid is wearing my jersey of the New Hampshire Grizzlies from when I was in my traveling league,” Lund recalls, smiling. His proud father attended the film’s premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Baseball, now filtered through filmmaking, seems to function for Lund as an unspoken gesture of genuine love. What could be more precious than time shared on a field? He bleeds Red Sox blood, so you won’t catch him cheering for the Dodgers any time soon, but L.A. has grown on him nonetheless. “At Dodger Stadium you can watch the sunset over the mountains,” he says, painting a scene. “It’s a beautiful experience.”