Baseball is rapidly becoming a game of athletic excellence. Its players are stronger and fitter than ever. They throw faster, swing harder, and routinely make plays of astounding agility, the kind that would get them on the first five minutes of Sportscenter if ESPN still covered baseball in any sort of meaningful way. Older fans know it wasn’t always this way. Ballplayers were once known for being pudgy and out of shape. They had “dad bods” long before that was a term. Sometimes they even snuck food into the dugout or bullpen. This was part of the game’s appeal. It was a game for the everyman, and the players’ soft bodies and lack of athletic ability indulged the secret fantasy of every fan: that we could stroll up to the plate and maybe—just maybe—put a good swing on the ball and get on base. 

That dream is now dead, and it’s not only because of fitness and conditioning. The game itself is changing. All the things that regular people might be able to do—like bunting or throwing four slow pitches outside the strike zone for an intentional walk—have been essentially phased out of America’s one-time pasttime. Baseball isn’t relatable anymore. Even umpires are going the way of the dodo. All that’s left is athletic excellence. How uninteresting. There’s a reason many of the best early baseball movies, like The Pride of the Yankees, The Stratton Story, and The Pride of St. Louis, open with a player literally being plucked off a city sandlot or country baseball field and taken to the major leagues. It’s a way in for the average viewer. A doorway for the ungifted.

Eephus, the best baseball film in about a decade, indulges the sport’s Everyman appeal to a tragic-comic degree. It chronicles a single recreational league game, set on a fictional field in Massachusetts that is scheduled to be bulldozed the following day. The field is old, and so are most of the players. We could say they are well past their prime, but it’s not clear they ever had one. Neither their pasts nor their futures are ever spoken of, but we can squint and imagine them as high school athletes who have been reliving their glory days for so long that they can barely remember them. There are gray hairs and big bellies. When the ball is hit hard, it’s a problem because it means the fielders have to run after it, and running is hard on their knees. Every pitch is an eephus, which, as one player explains, is a pitch thrown so slowly that it has the effect of stopping time.

The players serve as an antidote to the primacy of athletic excellence in baseball, but so does the plot, to the degree that it has one. Eephus deemphasizes the drama of the game itself. There is little sense of lead changes or momentum swings. We know the game is tied when the umpires decide to go home because they’ve worked their minimum hours. The players decide to keep going because they want to squeeze as much baseball out of this field, this day, and their lives that they can. To be clear, no one is enjoying it. There are precious few smiles in Eephus, but there are plenty of grimaces. There are no goofy baseball montages set to John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” just a percussive score that sounds like an encroaching modern army. Technically, Eephus is a hangout movie, but not like Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, the last great baseball film, which spent more time watching its players womanize and philosophize than showing any actual baseball. Other baseball movies emphasize the heroism of their players (or in the case of Moneyball, the guys in the polo shirts). Everybody Wants Some lives in the glorious moments in between action. Eephus is a long, slow fade-out. These guys are not playing baseball because they love it. Not anymore. They’re playing because baseball demands to be played.

It’s a timely observation. Once the national sport and a symbol of the American Dream, baseball has long since fallen from its perch atop the culture. Football is king now, with basketball a clear second. Baseball is still hugely popular, with over 71 million tickets sold in 2024, only a slight decrease from their peak of 79 million in 2007. TV ratings have dropped dramatically, that’s largely a result of changes in the TV and streaming landscape. Baseball hasn’t gotten less popular. Other sports have gotten more popular, so what is a fan to do? The answer is in the sturdiness of the game itself. Each game serves as a synecdoche of the sport itself. It exists in a liminal space between winning and losing. It never began, and it will never end. Just keep watching, and just keep playing. That’s all we can do.

Baseball, after all, is a sport that manipulates time more than any other. Even with the pitch clock, a game can go on forever. In Eephus, it basically does. The score remains tied, and the sky darkens, but still no one wants to go home, so they bring their cars to the field and play in the dusk of their headlights. It harkens back to the early days of the game before walls of lights peered down at the field, and day became indistinguishable from night. Baseball wasn’t more pure back then—the players cheated and gambled far more than they do today—but we like to pretend it was. Eephus indulges us in that fantasy, stopping time one last time, reminding us of the game at its most elemental.

Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a culture critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books, and others. His book, Baseball: The Movie, is currently available wherever you buy books.