there's only crying in baseball
men having feelings about beau travail // NIMBY apocalypses in eephus // the glorious minneapolis-st. paul international film festival
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got Carson Lund’s debut Eephus (out just in time for Opening Day), a bonus essay about Beau Travail I wrote for the Trylon, and a preview of MSPIFF. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week actually means Wednesday. Please enjoy - and if you do, consider sharing it with a friend.
I wrote a piece about Claire Denis’s 1999 perfect film Beau Travail for the Trylon’s film blog Perisphere. It’s called “all our trashcans within” and it’s about emotional reactions that men have to the famous final scene. I worked hard on this essay and think it’s really good and you should read it. I got some great quotes for it, including a couple from people who I consider famous. Read it at Perisphere now. AND - Beau Travail will be screening at the Trylon in Minneapolis Sunday, April 6th through Tuesday, April 9th. If you are a man who lives in the Twin Cities who hasn’t seen this film, you should go. It’ll mess you up.
On the subject of things that make me feel too much about masculinity - baseball is back! At the time of writing, the Twins are off to an 0-4 start with half their celebrated rotation pitching at 24.0+ ERAs, two of their best hitters already injured, and Carlos Correa batting .000. If last season is any indicator, this is where we'll start and this is where we'll end back up.
Things aren't any less bleak for the guys in Eephus, Carson Lund's directorial debut that’s slipping in and out of theaters this spring. The premise is simple: Soldier's Field, home to decades of small-town Massachusetts community baseball games, is going to be demolished to make way for a school. A group of men - nine for the hometown Riverdogs, 11 for Adler’s Paint, plus two umpires and a scorekeeper - come together to play out the last game of the season before ground breaks on construction.
Eephus belongs to the long tradition of "last night of the [blank]" movies, a premise that ends either with the community rallying to keep the doors open or with a final shot of someone looking back wistfully as he shuts off the lights. You know which way Eephus is going. Lund sets the tone from the get-go, opening with a shadowy infield sountracked by doomy drum hits that return intermittently as the day passes on. Everyone playing knows that this is over. These aren't the sort of guys who are going to get it together to save the field. Their community couldn't care less about them. And the enemy they’re rallying against is an elementary school.
Nothing noble is happening here: community baseball nuts are some of the most annoying people on earth. When the city of St. Paul started housing and retail re-zoning on the former Ford Plant grounds in Highland Park, a group of men started a campaign that clogged the neighborhood newspaper with letter after letter bemoaning the loss of three baseball diamonds. Is there anything that matters less in the world than community baseball diamonds? There’s one in every park in the city and I’ve barely seen a single one of them in use in over 10 years. This is the worst kind of NIMBY poison, the pine weasel of the city1.
But this isn't the point. Nobody in Eephus has the gumption to petition the newspaper; they can barely show up to their own game. Baseball movies thrive off sentimentalism, and Eephus has none of it. There aren’t any of the speeches or images that define baseball romance: no fresh-cut grass, no lovingly raked red dirt, hardly even a crack of the bat (these guys aren’t very good at hitting). The audience doesn't understand the game, the veterans don't like it, and the young guns are relieved to get out before their knees are wrecked. The game is sustained through some combination of inertia, hyperfixation, and passive enjoyment. When asked what he'll do after the field is replaced, the scorekeeper shrugs and says he might pick up bowling.
At it’s most cynical, Eephus overplays it’s lack of sentiment, dwelling on stoned attendees and bitter commentary and Joe Castiglione popping in as a pizza-truck operator to say “I hate this business.”2 At it’s warmest, it swings at something magical before grounding out into materiality. As the game rolls into the eighth inning, the dough-faced catcher of the Riverdogs tells his elder pitcher that he’s probably hanging up his pads for good. The pitcher shakes his head. “Get back out there,'“ he croaks. “Make the next pitcher feel safe. Make the world a better place.” This is nonsense, but it’s the kind of nonsense that suddenly makes the inanity playing out in front of you feel like the most important thing in the world. The line goes nowhere. Nothing about what happens next makes me suspect that this catcher is going to take it to heart. But for a second he believes it, and I do too.3
Most of Eephus’s successes as a movie tend to shoot it in the foot. It takes place over the course of a baseball game, a format most people find too boring to sit through when it’s played by extraordinary athletes at high stakes. It goes out of it’s way to refuse the center to any of it’s cast, which creates a chaotic community feel but also robs us of any audience surrogate or narrative grounding. It’s humor is grounded in baseball minutia, especially New England baseball minutia, which means its tailor-made for one notably obnoxious portion of the population and relatively alienating to everyone else. It owns all of these things admirably, but it’s so immersive that you might end up as anxious to get out of there in nine innings as the players are.4
Long, drawn out, pointless - playing out in front of us but hard to defend as “worth it.” The central literalism metaphor of Eephus is the eephus, a rare pitch in which the ball is tossed in a high, slow arc that should be easy to hit but is so outside the norm that it catches the batter off-guard. You can get into the physics of it all you want, but the fact of the matter is that it’s a stupid pitch that ends up as either a massive hit or a spectacular miss - as one of the Adler’s Painters says, “it’s kinda like baseball.” Probably the most famous eephus of all time was thrown by Bill “Spaceman” Lee in Game Seven of the 1975 World Series. Lee’s eephus was destroyed by Tony Pérez in a Green Monster-clearing two-run homer that lay the groundwork for a blown Red Sox lead, one of their most embarrassing losses in a long history of embarrassing World Series losses. Lee (also famous for his Maoist politics and for running for president on the nonexistent Rhinoceros Party ticket) shows up for one inning in Eephus, making constant self-commentary and ample use of his signature pitch. It’s a nice little bit of inside baseball - Lee's eephus presided over the destruction of one generation of New England baseball, and here it is happening again.
I felt a wave of melancholy as I left the theater, even though spring is imminent and baseball is all-too-alive. I have no time for the baseball-isn’t-like-it-used-to-be talk: we don't have Spaceman Lee anymore, but we've still got Freddie Freeman. Maybe it’s just the passing away of the community baseball that Eephus celebrates. But I've never remotely enjoyed playing this game - at least 50% of my sense of inadequacy as a man is tied up in my inability to throw a baseball. Is it the passing of public idleness, then? The bulldozing of American inanity in exchange for optimization, functionality, progress?
No, I think it comes down to the sad fact that actually I can’t not be romantic about baseball. I'm a sucker for this bullshit the same way most people are for dogs, and it makes me sad to think that one day it will pass. If I had to bet, I would say that I’m going to outlive the Minnesota Twins. I am probably going to watch the gradual fading away of dirt infields in city parks. If I actually believe in the politics that I supposedly believe in, I'm going to have to accept and even celebrate the replacement of baseball fields with institutions of progress.
Eephus presents a losing argument, and I think it knows that. "Someday this dugout will be an art room," Adler’s Paint’s pitcher says with disgust to one of his younger teammates. “Maybe your daughter will go there, and the two of you can make paintings about it.” This is not a script that believes it’s about something important. But that doesn't make it any less sad. This is what Jenny Odell calls an apocalypse, “the loss of what was familiar and comforting too me,” the understanding that “many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born.”5 This loss happens every October, an end to what started every March, and so it will continue until the final season, when all the teams have been sold to Las Vegas and the fields are paved over for pickleball courts. Oh well. It's hard to imagine some legendary pickleballer saying that he’s the luckiest man on the face of the earth, but that's for future generations to decide, not me.
I’m going to pretend to be a real critic and hang out at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) these next two weeks (tickets still available if you want to come too). Someday maybe we’ll be a real city, but for now our festival is mostly made up of movies that have already debuted at the festivals that people talk about. That’s OK - great movies are great everywhere, and a lot of these are never going to get the wide release they deserve. I’m excited for Misericordia, which has been described as a gay French Coen Brothers movie; Sister Midnight, a surreal body-horror/comedy from India; Grand Tour, which won Miguel Gomes the Best Director award at Cannes last year; Caught by the Tides, which will either be spectacularly boring or a deeply moving innovation in meta-cinema; and Friendship, which seems like an even scarier version of Banshees of Inisherin. I know you assholes on the coasts already get to watch a bunch of these movies in normal theaters, but some of us in Real America appreciate culture too, so let us have this.
Thanks for reading this week’s installment of life is disappointing. If you found this review slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, I guess pledging me money, or (probably most usefully to everyone involved) subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. You can even send it to your spam. I’ll be back next week with news from MSPIFF, a big announcement(!), and maybe a review of the Minecraft movie or something.
It may be interesting to note here that the members of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House were tangentially involved in the production of this film, and that Will Menaker and Amber A’Lee Frost pop up in the credits as radio voices.
Joe Castiglione means nothing to me, but for all the Red Sox fans out there I imagine this bit is hilarious.
I’m a sucker for catcher stuff. Add Joe Mauer’s last game to the list of things that regularly make me cry.
I had to pee real bad starting about 70 minutes in, so this experience might have been more exasperating for me than it needed to be.
Saving Time (Random House, 2024), p. 187. Good book!