Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

“Strikeouts are Fascist” -Crash Davis, Bull Durham

The movie award season has just wrapped up, culminating in the Best Picture and Best Actress Academy Awards going to a film about the perversion of the American Dream that portrays a stripper/escort who marries her client, an overindulged teenage son of a Russian oligarch, on a Vegas whim, and hopes to live happily ever after in his family’s ostentatious Brighton Beach mansion. After an hour of essentially soft core pornography illustrating the couple’s “relationship,” the heroine displays her unique thespian skills in a scene where she feistily eludes a couple of Russian thugs sent by her new in-laws while screaming various iterations of “motherf***er” at her would-be detainers. Not exactly Tracy and Hepburn.

There couldn’t be a film more different from Anora than the recently released Eephus, an un-Hollywood movie about a group of middle-aged (and older) men playing the last game of baseball on a small New England town field that is about to be torn down in favor of a new public school. The field has been the site of similar contests for decades and the players sniff at the notion of moving their games to a nearby town as beneath them.

Like the game of baseball, the movie goes on and on, but the players refuse to leave, eventually trying in vain to light the field with their car headlights. The game finally ends with a (yawn) bases-loaded walk. These are regular guys who are not trying to relive their glory days; they display little skill and are more like never-weres. But their passion or, more accurately, obsession for the game never flags.

Eephus is not for everyone. If you don’t get excited about a 1–0 mid-August thriller between the Marlins and the Cubs, skip it. But if you think it is funny that one player’s wife is named Linda Belinda or that the manager of one of the teams gets dragged kicking and screaming to a family Christening in the middle of the game, then it is probably for you. As an added treat, the unseen radio announcer is voiced by the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman, while Red Sox fans will delight at the appearance of a 79 year old Bill “Spaceman” Lee who backs up his promise that “I can get you three outs.”

Baseball movies have always hit a certain nerve in terms of longing for the past, and the fact that Eephus takes place in the ebbing days of late autumn makes it the perfect elegy to a diminishing and perhaps dying part of America.

Despite its actual urban origins, the game of baseball has always represented our country’s pastoral past. If a football game is like a train wreck, baseball is more like a stroll through the woods on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing much happens, except the elapsing of time. Just like much of life.

Of course baseball has long since ceded its role as our National Pastime to the chaotic violence of football, which is probably a more appropriate spectacle in a country that is teetering on the edge of turbulent political upheaval. We are led by a president whose vision of sports begins and ends with Mixed Martial Arts, and who has appointed an Education Secretary whose professional skills consist of promoting professional wrestling through WWE, an enterprise that relies on a combination of steroid-inflated cartoon characters and the sexual exploitation of children for its success. Such experience makes her perfectly suited to fulfill her mandate to dismantle her own department.

But there is still an unanswered question. What exactly is an “eephus?” As explained by one of the players, it is a high-arcing pitch so slow that the hitter is either fooled into swinging and missing in greedy anticipation or is so mesmerized that it drops over the plate for a called strike. It’s sorta like baseball’s version of a con job. So, while baseball may no longer hold the country’s collective interest the way it once did, there is at least one small aspect that is relevant today. We as a country can still be sold a bill of goods.

Viewing Eephus reminds me of what the old-time Dodger Frenchy Bordagaray said when he learned of his fine for spitting at an umpire: “[i]t was more than I expectorated.”