Eephus pitch made famous by ‘Spaceman’ Bill Lee now a movie about love of baseball
An almost ethereal pitcher mysteriously appears in the late innings of “Eephus” and pitches an inning before disappearing.
I thought, “Sheez, that actor actually looks like an athlete.”
Duh, it was Bill Lee. Even in his late 70s, Lee carries himself like a player. It was perfect casting of one of baseball’s all-time characters by director Carson Lund. The former Red Sox and Expo lefty was aptly nicknamed “Spaceman.”
On the whole, the unrated “Eephus” is about ordinary men doing ordinary things. Fair warning to parents thinking of taking the kids, the ordinary guys talk like guys chilling and drinking beer on Sunday afternoon. Coincidentally, cases of Old Irving Brewing Co.’s Eephus, a pale ale (New England/hazy), were stacked in the Music Box before the preview.
The movie has more slice of life for the love of baseball than plot line. The movie is beginning to end of the final game played at Soldier’s Field in New England on a fall afternoon. The county board is razing the field to make way for a school. It’s that simple, yet slowly intertwined with real life, down to a college kid being offered a job opportunity.
Most of the players on the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint are over-hill town players with a few college kids with skills mixed in. What keeps the movie from fading into sentimentalism is that the players are types, but also individuals with their own snippets of stories.
Aside from Lee, my attention was caught by Franny (played by Cliff Blake). He keeps score from a chair he brings. A crucial part of the plot revolves around when he was pressed into umpiring duty and moved up to the press box as night thickened.
If you’ve knocked around youth, high school, college or pro ball, you know him. He’s an archetype, which I happen to have more of an affinity than I like to admit. I kept a scorecard from my first game as an eighth-grader to see the Phillies in their first year at Veterans Stadium until our kids piled so thick that my scorecard became more MO and DP than 6-3 and 4-6-3.
As a slice of life, “Eephus” moves at a pace befitting its name. Think the antithesis of the Fast & Furious franchise.
An eephus is an extremely slow arching pitch, which MLB.com accurately describes as “resembling the trajectory of a slow-pitch softball pitch. Hitters, expecting a fastball that’s nearly twice the velocity of the eephus, can get over-zealous and swing too early and hard.”
Of course, those who time the eephus do what Alex Rodriguez did in Aug. 26, 2002, when he tattooed a 48-mph eephus from Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez over the wall at Yankee Stadium.
MLB.com credits Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell with throwing the first eephus. It was named by teammate Maurice Van Robays, saying, “Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” MLB.com stretched for this conclusion, “In Hebrew, the word ‘efes’ can be loosely translated into ‘nothing,’ and the word ‘eephus’ undoubtedly stems from that.”
My favorite memory of an eephus came in Sept. 4, 2004, when the White Sox hosted the Mariners. I was covering the weekend series for the Seattle Times, which didn’t want the expense of sending their beat writer to a play-out-the-string September series.
In the seventh inning, the Sox’ Mark Buehrle offered a 66-mph eephus to Ichiro Suzuki. It was doubly funny because the Sox’ ace was one of the softest throwing pitchers of his era. He had good reason to throw even radically slower. With the four hits Ichiro had that night, he was 9-for-20 against Buehrle.
Major media George Will-esque types will rave or already have about this ode to baseball. If you love baseball, you will love “Eephus.” If you’re an ordinary human, even an ordinary sports-loving human, it may feel more like an almost subversive death knell for what was once America’s pastime.
“Eephus” plays at the Music Box, a few blocks northwest of Wrigley Field, at 7 p.m. Friday. After the screening, there will be a Q&A with director Lund.
On the way home from the preview, I was compelled to stop at Byron’s on Irving Park for a hot dog. Fittingly, the Music Box will have a hot dog food truck from Lola’s Coney Island in front from 6-8 p.m.