.jpg)
This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Eephus, the new film directed by Carson Lund and cowritten by Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher, sits perfectly in the middle of the baseball movie and hang-out movie Venn diagram. The movie follows two amateur baseball teams in suburban Massachusetts who are trying to get one last game in before the sun sets—and before their beloved field is paved over to build a school. It’s a tender depiction of male friendship and the bonds that are formed on a baseball diamond, but it’s also a straight up delightful movie. (The name derives from the eephus pitch, a fittingly wacky, super slow curveball that throws off the hitter’s timing with its endless, arcing trajectory.)
During this final game, we meet a carefully curated group of men clinging to their last gasps of athleticism. There are the younger, buffer guys who can credibly pass as real ballplayers, the sailor-mouthed, long-haired beer drinkers mostly in it for something to do, the hothead who gets worked up over the smallest things, and even a pure-hearted local who simply comes to every game to keep score.
For Basta, Fisher, and Lund, this is a movie inspired by some of Hollywood’s most classic sun up-to-sun down tales, like Last Night at the Alamo and Dazed and Confused. With a tight budget, a ragtag team of actors—including Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who was an MLB pitcher for 14 years and, among other things, once told the commissioner that he sprinkled marijuana on his pancakes and ran five miles to the stadium—and several one-liners that will make you laugh out loud, Eephus immediately stakes its claim as the best sports movie of the 2020s.
In a recent dugout chat with GQ, the writing trio discuss getting the cast into baseball shape, the early rehearsals that were mostly just infield practice, and convincing one of baseball’s all-time oddballs to not only be in the movie, but actually read his lines.
Carson Lund: Well, I think it's worth pointing out right away that I play in a rec wooden bat league on a team called The Soldiers. I've been playing in this league for about a decade here in Los Angeles, but I've also played my whole life, so I just was drumming up memories and anecdotes, different characters that I thought would be right for a film. But the actual premise of deciding to make a film about one single game, that evolved. I was playing all these games and just noticing things that were happening week to week, and the relationships that I was building with these people. That felt very unique in this very specific context.
One time, there was a shadow boxer in the outfield, which then made its way into the film. I was just noticing things that felt like a great canvas for a kind of big ensemble comedy that happens in real time. I can't remember exactly when I brought the idea to you guys.
Nate Fisher: I think as soon as you guys finished Ham on Rye [a 2019 film in which Basta is a producer and Lund is the cinematographer] you were like, “All right, I know that the next thing we want to shoot is going to be a baseball movie.” That's when Carson came to me and was like, “We got to sit down one of these days and figure out how we're going to do this.” In terms of actually doing sweaty difficult work on it, it's been five and a half years at least.
Michael Basta: I think what got us so excited was that early idea of the field being torn down and becoming a school. We were like, “All right, we have to write this now,” because we have this idea that just cements everything.
Fisher: No, very opposite. I played in our cast and crew scrimmage at East River Park the weekend of our American premiere at the New York Film Festival. I was the de facto coach of one of the teams and eventually the closer, where I proceeded to blow a seven-run lead and get walked off, thanks to no help from my infield. I'm going to fully throw my infielders under the bus there. I think we had four errors. After that, a mysterious figure came out of the woods and handed me a card that said Banned From Baseball For Life. I've never played again.
Lund: I’m the only active player, but these guys are both fans.
Fisher: Watchers.
Basta: Yeah. A lot of them were just a combination of, “Oh, my cousin kind of looks like this. We can put his face there. I just Google image searched this guy and his aura is perfect for this person.”
Fisher: We had some characters that we knew we wanted and we knew where we could fit them in, but there were a lot of guys where we started with the position: Alright, we've got the one type of first baseman and the other type of first baseman. We've got the silly right fielder and the evil right fielder. This is the type of person that pitches nine innings. Stuff like that.
Lund: Because you’re right. When you play on a team, especially in an amateur context, these are people who've probably watched a lot of baseball, who've seen baseball movies, and you come to the field kind of performing a bit. You are fitting into that archetype when you join the team dynamic. They played in Little League, and they're still playing those roles 40, 50 years later as adults in a rec league.
Lund: That’s a good point. That’s a situation where, really, that actor should have been in right field. Once we started doing our rehearsals, I realized, oh, he can't really throw the ball. Typically, that's where you put a right fielder [in a men’s league] because you're getting fewer balls hit over there. But we had constructed a script that was just so intricate in terms of where players are at any given moment and where the ball needs to go, that it would've changed a lot of other things. So, we just had to keep him there, but we just leaned into the fact that he's not going to make a single play out there.
Fisher: The thing you have to understand about Chuck is that that line he has about being fast in his heyday is true. Fifteen years ago, he broke the league's single season stolen base record. It's on his baseball card, which we're going to post on the Eephus Instagram account. He stole 25 bases his first season and hasn't stolen one in the 14 years since. He kind of let himself go a little bit. But he used to cover that whole outfield.
Lund: More so in a baseball sense. We would have in-depth conversations about who we think these people are. Okay, what do you think this guy does in his daily life? What is his job? What are his interests? What does he hate? But I think, much like the film, we want it kind of hermetically sealed around this baseball field because they want to create an identity on that field that they don't have somewhere else in their life.
Fisher: They have a job to do there, and any stuff that comes out about their personal lives comes out by accident.
Lund: Yeah, a lot of the early rehearsals were just baseball practices.
Lund: I wish we had had more of a baseball boot camp, but we didn't have the budget necessary for that, or the time to do it. What really happened was, the whole month we were shooting, during any downtime, these guys were out there on the field playing catch.
Fisher: Any chance we got, if we had enough people, and we usually did have enough people—we’d do some forms of drills or some forms of practice. It was a one-location shoot, and at least half the cast is there at any given time on any given day. So, we tried to make sure that we were always working on something. I would say we learned during the shoot more than before. I could throw strikes by the end of it and I could throw 70, 80 pitches. My arm would hurt, but I could still write with a pen, you know? We made some significant and meaningful strides, and it made me really, really, really want to play baseball again. But sadly I can't because that guy from the woods.
Basta: A lot of the rehearsals were not even just getting back to playing baseball, but also learning how to look like a baseball player on the field and in the dugout. A lot of the actors are like, “Oh yeah, I played baseball.” Then we went through rehearsals, and found out they played baseball when they were five years old.
Lund: When you watch a broadcast, you're really only seeing where the action is concentrated. What you're not seeing is all the gestures that are happening with the fielders when they're anticipating a pitch or when they're in the dugout watching. All these things that make you look like a ball player, I had to try to explain step-by-step.
Basta: The proper nut scratch, yeah. We were also lucky because the guy who plays the umpire is an actual umpire. He was really helpful in the very detailed things that happen on the field and following the proper rules.
Basta: I think it's just the sense of time during a baseball game. The fact that there's no clock, and it could just keep going and going forever and you could get lost. I mean, for me, always watching games, you just get lost in a conversation with somebody. You're messing around with your friends or something, and then all of a sudden you're in the ninth inning and you're like, “Oh, shit, it's almost over and I have to go home. I wasn't prepared for that.” It’s that fluctuating feeling of time passing—that is the romance for me.
Fisher: I have sort of a novel addendum to this. We talk a lot about these sort of spatial and temporal dynamics of the game. It's a big field of guys standing around and waiting for something to happen, and that sort of suspended moment really opens the door for a lot of strange things to happen. That stillness is so unnatural—especially in modern industrial life where the work is the thing, and the sense of being duty bound to time and toil is such an important part of day-to-day life—this is why it's weird and this is why it's compelling.
The other aspect of it that I really latch onto is, we have 150 years of [baseball] history. So, it's not really a coincidence that baseball, even at minor levels, is played by the weirdest people in the history of humanity. The weirdest people of all time play baseball, and there's thousands of them. We even have one of them in our movie. One of the most idiosyncratic, iconic people to ever play the game, Bill Lee.
Lund: When we decided that the eephus was central to the film—both as a pitch itself and also as a structuring metaphor for the film—that's when we were like, well, we need to find someone who has thrown this pitch famously. Zack Greinke was our model for a contemporary pitcher who still throws it. Nate sort of modeled his performance after him, I should add. But I really wanted someone who was a mystic from baseball's past to come into the game and throw this pitch, and then leave these players sort of stranded and wondering what comes next. I thought of many different people for this and we actually tried to reach out to many of those people, and it is difficult, obviously. Any old baseball player has many layers of defense before you can actually talk to them. There's an agent or a manager or whatever, and they do all these public speaking appearances.
Bill is, thankfully, just devoid of all of that. He lives on a farm in upstate Vermont, right near the border of Canada, and has a landline and he answers it. He does not duck calls, and we maintained a phone correspondence for about a year before shooting. He basically said yes the minute I first spoke with him, and claims to have read the script that day by going to the library and opening up the computer. He called me two hours later after I sent him the script and was like, "Yeah, yeah, the light goes down and all of it. All that stuff. Yeah, it's great."
Lund: He said that! It’s actually in his book.
Fisher: He takes credit for that and claims that Ron Shelton put that in Bull Durham because of him. He said that on set a lot. We had written some very specific lines for him. I was very proud of those lines.
Lund: They were good.
Fisher: He goes, “Nobody puts words in my mouth. I'm not reading this.” Eventually, he got a little tired and was like, “What are my lines?” So, we gave them to him. But he would ad lib and put stuff in. We were almost 100% doctrinaire about having no cultural references in it. Nothing to pin it in time or reference the outside world, and certainly, certainly not anything that directly references a better baseball movie. We had to make sure he wasn’t completely stealing lines from Bull Durham.
Lund: I'm comfortable with the hang-out movie term. There are a number that we looked at, and I think we maintained a list of films that were inspirational. Definitely some Howard Hawks films, who I would consider an early master of the hang-out film, without it even being called that at the time.
But I think we really wanted to just try to approach this without too much baggage from other films. We didn't watch any baseball movies. We didn't really talk about them at all. The attempt was to make something completely new within baseball cinema, and to just let our guide be the weirdness and the flow of the game.
Fisher: I would say it was pretty easy for us to not think about baseball movies, because the vast majority of them are so mythological and so grandiose. For one thing, they're about major league players and they have sort of a grand canvas to paint on. We don't really have the budget or interest to work in that sandbox. For me, it was a lot of stuff like old Westerns, we touched on this with Howard Hawks, but there are a lot of those old stripped down fifties Westerns by Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, where it's like, first you go do this, and then you go do that, and then you go to this. It all takes place over a day or two.
Basta: For me, it was so much about my experience with baseball being sitting and watching and just being with people. We were so interested in these characters, we just wanted to hang out with them. But especially in the scenario where they're all losing something, and I think a lot of inspiration for that comes from movies about a loss. I always point to the film Last Night at the Alamo, about the last night of these people hanging out at a bar.
I was always interested in a big group of people who are all experiencing the same thing, losing the same thing, but they still can't connect with each other even though they want to so badly. This is their set, and their world, and they are being forced to leave it.