Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators.

Monica Castillo, JBFC Senior Film Programmer writes, “Carson Lund’s feature debut Eephus is unlike any other baseball movie you’ve seen. The players aren’t kids or pros. They’ve seen their fair share of seasons, but on this day in October 1994, it will be their last game on their trusty old field. A school is slated to take over the lot, and the weekly ritual of gathering around this green diamond will come to an end. But before anyone gets too teary eyed about the times a-changin’, there’s a game to play, a team to beat, and some celebratory beer to drink with fireworks. Lund, who’s filmed other movies like Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, builds on his love of baseball, its lore, and routines to create a love letter to the sport and the end of an era, the nostalgia we feel for days gone by and the friends (and rivals) we made along the way.

In a sense, the movie Eephus, named after a complex pitch, has much more in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show than it does with The Pride of the Yankees, but this is the kind of character-driven sports movie that anyone can root for and is a unique treat for the baseball fans in our audience.”