'Eephus' Is an Instant Baseball Movie Classic

Carson Lund's film distils the mundane pleasures and casual heartbreak of sport played at its most modest level

- Uday Bhatia

M. Barrie, author of the Peter Pan books and an enthusiastic amateur cricketer of limited skill, said of his bowling: "If I have sent down a bad delivery I can always pursue the ball, recapture it and send it down again." I know little of baseball, but the Eephus pitch sounds something like that. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary describes it as a "slowly thrown, high-arcing pitch likely to reach an apex of 25 feet above the ground between the mound and the plate". Rip Sewell, who originated the pitch in the 1940s, said it was "Fun to watch, easy to catch, but tough to hit." Carson Lund's Eephus (playing at the Red Lorry Film Festival in Mumbai) is fun to watch and easy to catch, arcing in a graceful, unhurried parabola towards the viewer. The film runs an hour and 38 minutes, but you could tell me it was considerably shorter or a lot longer than that and I'd believe you. This too makes it like the pitch. One of the players theorises that the Eephus is so slow it makes the batter lose track of time. "I like that," his teammate replies. "It's kind of like baseball. I'm waiting for something to happen and poof, game's over."