Controversially, the implementation of a launch clock in 2023 effectively transformed the experience of playing and seeing the major baseball leagues. By undermining the pitcher's authority on how tickets flow, the timer shortens the duration of a game.
Now, as the filmmaker and recreational player Carson Lund points out, the United States hobby has become another transactional activity, something you can schedule to enter and leave. A sport that was once leisurely has been forced to meet the demands of our Hipperspeed culture.
“I find it cynical,” Lund, 33, tells me while we sat on a picnic table in Elysian Park in front of a field with teenagers in baseball. “At its purest point, and as it was for 100 years, baseball is a game that could take five, six hours if it had to do it. He created his own sense of time and could continue forever. “
The desire to portray the cautious quality of baseball prompted Lund to co -write and direct its debut characteristic, “Eephus” (now in cinemas), a funly and deliciously acted drama in the 1990s on two recreational teams for adults in the suburbs of Massachusetts that play a last game before their local field, it has become a school.
From the left, Cliff Blake, Tay Taylor, Jeff Saint Dec and Ethan Ward in the movie “Eephus”.
(Music Box Films)
As the day becomes the night, men play, they never manage to express their pain shared by loss, which produces humor and pathos. Their friends are bound by baseball and may not extend beyond the field, however, Lund thinks that these teams driven by the team are authentic, even if they had.
“You work through your feelings through the language of the game and competitive jokes,” says Lund. “The jokes in the film are very regional, it feels like New England for me, a place where sports are part of the culture that have infused the vernacular.”
Lund says he never worried a lot about baseball movies. He thinks that all of them lack the rhythms of the game because, as with a launch clock, they are “ultimately subordinated to the demands of Hollywood narratives.”
“They are often obsessed with people who are going through some kind of transformation and the game is simply a metaphor of that,” Lund explains. “I wanted to immerse you in this only day in a single field and create a more collective experience with a great set that is the same, which says goodbye to a ritual, saying goodbye to a version of themselves that create in that field together.”
Lund says his film is about “saying goodbye to a ritual.”
(Ethan Benavidez / for the times)
Lund's approach on a deeply American theme implied rhythm and formal options that one could associate more often with European art films or even Asian “slow” cinema. Lund was aimed at evoking the yearning of the 2003 film by Master Tsai Ming-Liang based in Taiwan “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”, about the last presentation in a movie theater about to close.
“I was interested in bittersweet funeral quality that resists the Tsai movie,” says Lund. “The movies that I love most are those that privilege a certain degree of distraction or floating attention and allow him to luxuriar in the atmosphere.”
An avid cinefile whose broad smile often illuminates his face, Lund began to watch Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman movies at an early age through his father's recommendations. It is especially safe when talking about baseball. Lund found the ideal field for “Eephus” in the small city of Douglas, Massachusetts, after visiting more than 100 diamonds in New England. “I wanted a field that felt degraded by time with old wood, shipyard paint and a sensation of history,” he says.
Since his cast of characters is, in his words, “on the hill”, adult men ranging from oxity to outside, in a recreational league where bets are as low as they can
“I wanted to see the interaction between all these different bodies moving and the distance between all,” he explains. “There are many baseball qualities that do not share any other important sport. It is very unique. “
A scene of the movie “Eephus”.
(Music Box Films)
Born in a home -loving home in Boston, Lund grew up in Nashua, NH, and played campocorto in an itinerant league. His father, who played throughout his life until recently due to a sick knee, encouraged Lund and his brother to do so for love for the game, never as an obligation.
Lund partly played the coveted position of the painting in part because he admired Nomar Garciaparra, star player of the red socks in the late 90s and the first Aughts.
Although he aspired to the elderly, Lund finally found competitiveness among young men with similar ambitions too toxic. “I just stopped, what broke my dad's heart,” he says. “I was more interested in exploring creative points of sale.” A secondary work in his local library fed the growing appetite of Lund for international cinema.
Moving to Sunny Los Angeles, where Dodgers fervor is palpable wherever you go, Lund's fans revived for sport. During the last eight years he has recreationally played in the soldiers, a team that is part of the Baseball League of the Pacific coast. Some of their teammates soldiers for a long time knew that I was making a baseball movie, and everyone attended the “Eephus” AFEST projection in Hollywood in October.
“There is no competition in this league,” says Lund. “I found it very relaxing and cheerful. It is a sport, so you are striving, but the meditative baseball qualities really began to stand out. The qualities you see in the movie “.
Although his heart belongs to the Red Sox, Lund moved to Los Angeles to make films. “In the Dodger Stadium you can see the sunset on the mountains,” he says. “It's a beautiful experience.”
(Ethan Benavidez / for the times)
For Lund, cinema has always been a team sport. The script of “Eephus” arose from the collaboration with the childhood friend Michael Enough, part of the independent film collective Omnes Films with Lund, and Nate Fisher, with whom Lund first familiarized himself while attending projections in the Harvard movies file.
The writing began on zoom at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic with them asking what they would like to see in a baseball game. What archetypes would need to be included? That involved creating a cash score, a visual map of the fictional game that would develop throughout the film.
“Carson knew the game, Nate knows fun, strange and trivial baseball parts and had things out of the field,” he says enough through Zoom. “It was a fun mixture of different baseball minds.”
The trio first discovered what happened at the entrance. Once they had that structure, the process involved discussing when and how to spend time with each of the characters without prioritizing one over another.
“It was about negotiating the thrust between speed and stasis,” says Lund. “That's what baseball is about. These long periods of nothing happen and then explosions of action. I wanted to discover those passages from nothing and show that many things are really happening. “
Cliff Blake in the movie “Eephus”.
(Music Box Films)
In turn, Fisher agreed to participate as he could play a character based on his favorite player of all time, Zack Greinke, a prodigious pitcher known for his inexpressive sense of humor and his idiosyncratic personality. More importantly, Greinke still occasionally launches the archaic launch “Eephus” that gives the movie its title.
“We needed a guy who sit down on the sidelines and explain the entire topic of the movie in three minutes or less,” says Fisher during a video interview. “I gave myself because it is really easy to act when you write your own lines. Wait [Greinke] Come to watch this movie. “
As Fisher's character, Merritt, who uses the number 21 as Greinke did when he played for the beloved Fisher's team, Arizona's diamondbacks, he expresses it, the Eephus is “a type of curved ball that is thrown so antinaturally slow that confuses the dough … It makes time wasting time.”
Among the many cast members is the voice of the legendary documentary company Frederick Wiseman (“Titicut Follies”, “Central Park”) as radio announcer. Initially, Lund was intended to play a role in the camera, but Wiseman's elderly is 95 years old, complicated his participation. Lund would love to see the veteran non -fiction narrator make one of his acclaimed observation works on baseball.
“It wasn't just that I liked his voice,” says Lund about getting to Wiseman. “I felt that when putting it in the movie, I was telling the audience that this is more an anthropological film than a traditional narrative. It is a kind of signal. “
Red Sox fans will also delight in a late cameo of Bill Lee, nicknamed “Spaceman”, an eccentric baseball luminaire that, quite famous, also threw Eephus to take the offices. “Having his attached name helped us ensure financing,” Lund recalls.
While none of the adult characters in “Eephus” serves as direct proxies for Lund (“if it were in the movie, it would be a better campocorto,” he boasts, with entertainment), he found a way to put himself in the movie obliquely. In the middle of the game, a child and his father appear to practice, but discover that the field is busy. It is a short but personally significant moment.
“It is actually my dad playing the father and the child wears my t -shirt of the Grizzlies of New Hampshire since when I was in my travel league,” Lund recalls, smiling. His proud father attended the premiere of the film at the Cannes 2024 Film Festival.
Baseball, now filtered through cinema, seems to work for Lund as a tacit gesture of genuine love. What could be more precious than the shared time in a field? Bleach the blood of the red socks, so he will not catch him by encouraging the Dodgers in the short term, but has grown it in it. “In the Dodger Stadium you can see the sunset on the mountains,” he says, painting a scene. “It's a beautiful experience.”
