Nostalgia for Nostalgia, Reviewing the Movie “Eephus”

Football is war — its players, soldiers who hold the line and march through the enemy to win. Chess and Go, basketball and hockey, arm-wrestling and ultimate frisbee function through this same essential metaphor: victory requires those on the left pushing through and beating those on the right and vice-versa. It’s this struggle that defines the “sports movie” genre. But no war has been fought in the shape of a diamond, so until one breaks out, baseball movies will continue to constitute a distinct cinematic niche with a central metaphor far more abstract than violence and conquest. It’s a distinctive quality that used to scratch a particularly American itch.

The game used to be so popular that it came to be a convenient metaphor for American history. For better or worse, former President George W. Bush won the war on terror when he threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. Jackie Robinson is remembered as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle are thought to have beat the fascists, and Babe Ruth supposedly lifted the Great Depression. One of the key markers of postwar U.S. hegemony is that South Korea, Japan, and large swaths of Central and South America have come under the spell of baseball to the extent that it is considered each of these countries’ national pastimes. Everyone in the so-called “free world” loved baseball.

Loved the sport: past tense.

The declaration that baseball is dying is as old as the game itself. It’s come to be a mark of male (im)maturity to wax poetic about the sins of the contemporary game and the golden age from which we’ve all strayed. My generation is already coming to middle age: we regale each other with the myths of Derek Jeter, Big Papi, and Miguel Cabrera, those heroes who are to us what Achilles was to Homer. It feels as if a sport that was once synonymous with democracy, racial integration, and belligerent, baseless patriotism has decayed into something strange and foreign.

Of course, none of this is empirically true. Major League Baseball has always been a massive corporation that rakes in billions of dollars per year, but regardless of the actual stakes, conversations about baseball are always conversations about nostalgia. Everyone remembers the good years, the time when baseball meant something, the golden era. When was this era? Everyone has a different opinion, but it’s likely the one during which they were happiest.

If there’s any point to Carson Lund’s directorial debut, “Eephus” (2025), then it’s to present this haze of nostalgia. In an unknown town in ’90s America, a group of variously aged and employed dudes play their final recreational baseball game before their field is demolished to make room for a school. They’re mostly fat and out of shape. They have barely enough guys to play; one of them shows up late, another is forced to leave early. They don’t even seem to be particularly close: they hardly care about each other’s professional or personal lives enough to ask about either of them. At times, the audience is led to ask itself why they’re even playing in the first place, or why this is a movie at all.

The movie gets its title from a rare kind of pitch: the eephus pitch is one tossed so slowly that it confuses the hitter. As the thrower of said pitch explains, the pitch gives the illusion that the ball will never reach the hitter; that time has stopped and there’s nothing to do but wait for it to start again. The hitter’s folly is in their approximation of the ball’s velocity to nothingness; yes, it moves slowly, but it will reach home. As the coiner of the term, Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Maurice Van Robays, put it in 1942, “It’s a nothin’ pitch, and eephus ain’t nothin’.”

It’s with this central metaphor that the film responds to the most common complaint about baseball: it’s too boring and nothing happens. This critic is given a voice in “Eephus” through a pair of skater-bros who cannot understand how baseball works, make fun of the fat guys trying to run, but who also can’t stop watching. Baseball fans find it difficult to respond to this complaint because the skeptic is largely right. Very little can be said to happen during a game. So little, in fact, that one can chart every significant game action on a single sheet of paper with a simple code (and this is a very popular pastime among fans). Baseball, then, is the only sport where players and fans must actively find ways to fill the empty time. They chew, they grunt things like “little bingo” and “good eye, kid,” they hawk loogies (spit as far as they can), and they play with dirt. It’s essentially a game of oral and tactile fixations — a masticatory affair — and secondarily a competitive outlet. The innings churn along at a near-glacial pace, and by the time it’s over, we look around and wonder how time could’ve passed so quickly.

Baseball movies have always trafficked in nostalgia. “Field of Dreams” (1989) is the story of baseball legends’ ghosts coming to play one last game. “A League of Their Own” (1992) remembers a short-lived era when male players fought fascists and women played baseball. “Moneyball” (2011) marks the moment baseball abandoned its 20th-century mythical legacy and entered the realm of 21st-century analytics and economics. “The Sandlot” (1993) is one of the best representations of childhood, and therefore, nostalgia, available on film. We watch these films again and again to recover a trace of who we were when we first saw them, then we look at ourselves and wonder just where the time went. Thus “Eephus’” invocation of Yankees catcher-mystic Yogi Berra’s aphorism, “It’s getting late early.”

The whole tradition is a melancholic meditation where the only story is that which we make for ourselves and, therefore, that which always evades us, inevitably and eternally slipping from our fingers. The resulting sensation is a kind of emotional pang — a full-body ache that draws attention to one’s present condition: Shiatsu massage for the mind. Perhaps this explains why “nostalgia” is partly rooted in the Greek “algos,” meaning pain.

If these films are love letters to a game and a memory that’s always slipping away, then “Eephus” is baseball’s epitaph. There are no particularly memorable characters here, conversations begin but don’t go anywhere before fizzling out, and even the key antagonistic force, the impending destruction of the field for a new school, is nearly impossible to oppose in earnest. As they play in the ’90s (which is already nostalgic), they choose to listen to recordings of radio broadcasts from games in the ’70s, the outcome of which they already know. This is nostalgia at its furthest limit: living for the past to the extent they can hardly conceive of the future or even the present. If the men were any older and their field any more decrepit, “Eephus” might reach all the way to a kind of desperate metaphysical groping best articulated by Samuel Beckett.

We might wonder why the pitcher decides to throw their first pitch. Baseball is meant to be a game without clocks, so what motivates the pitcher to begin? Before the end of the world, we begin the game because we have a world to which we’d like to return. Post-apocalypse, after man’s total victory over nature, there’s no reason to expect we would ever start. Baseball at the end of the world is baseball beyond the threshold of language and significance.

As “Eephus” draws towards its end, one of the guys attempts to slide into second base to steal, but he’s called out. The sun hits the field on a slant, brushing the diamond with the golden-brown color of delicately toasted marshmallows. Shadows have lengthened, and outfielders have pulled their caps over their eyes to shield themselves from the glare. The guy stealing second lays in the dirt, winded and pathetic. Someone from the dugout asks, “Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?”

The other root for “nostalgia” is “nostos,” meaning “return home.” This is the central metaphor of the game: runs are scored when the batter returns to where they started. Victory in football is about conquering new lands; in baseball, by returning from those lands. Odysseus and Derek Jeter win by coming home. The game in “Eephus” ends with a whimper: a walk-off that excites nobody. The score has ceased to carry true significance because the game isn’t played to win, but to return to something inarticulable; to grab ahold of that which made us happy, once.  But unlike Odysseus, one can never win at the game of nostalgia.  We’d like to be gently tugged down into a whirlpool of memory until we’re back where we started, fully present and fully naive. But to chase nostalgia is to chase one’s own tail; to remember memory and memories of memory. The Greek etymology hides this secret: We can return to where we grew up, but we can never return to when we grew up.

There’s no way to reverse time, to see the eephus pitch tumble towards you in its perfect stillness again. Our nostalgia escapes any concrete, worldly presence and begins to hint at the pursuit of emptiness described by Lao Tzu. Dissimulation without end, or as Yogi Berra might put it, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”