The Luckiest Men on the Face of the Earth: A Reflection on Eephus and Place

Eephus. Directed by Carson Lund, performance by Sean Mahon, Nowhere Pictures, 2024.

Last night I watched Eephus, a movie which on the surface is about a small-town baseball park in Massachusetts in the ‘90’s, in October when the maple leaves are turning red. The park is going to be demolished so that a new school building can take its place. For the entire movie, we stay at the baseball park watching two local teams, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, battle out their last game at the park. Eephus (a term for a deceptively slow and high-arcing pitch) could be a movie about the soul-crushing and culture-destroying effects of progress. It could be a movie about the fragility of male friendship. It could even be about the philosophical and social significance of baseball for American culture. It is all those things and more.

But more than anything else, I think this is a movie about the precious and irreducible nature of certain places. We get to look at this baseball park for the entire movie. The most we get to see is where the cars are parked out on the perimeter. We see that when the guys go and get their cars and drive them onto the field so they can continue to play at night. We get to see a forested perimeter where, after all the others have driven off, the scorekeeper walks into the dark, apparently taking a trail back to his home. Otherwise, we are looking at the field, at the dirt, at the dugouts, the bases. We are looking at the chain-link fence that surrounds the park, and the metal chair that the scorekeeper sits on. He has apparently sat in the same place for decades, using a notation system on form paper which feels obsolete but was probably the mode of keeping score for most of baseball‘s existence.

We get to see baseball shorthand on the scorecard, scratched in pencil. Later in the game, when it’s dark, the scorekeeper ascends to the high seat above home plate to better observe the game, and now he is also the umpire (but won’t get on the field). We see the crushed beer cans and plastic coolers. The guys are wearing professional looking baseball uniforms with wide belts, the right kind of helmets, sunglasses. We have men of all ages, from their 20s to grandpas. There are black players and white players, and they all clearly get along in a man kind of way. They get mad at each other, and they swear at each other, but it means very little. Most of the time they pat each other on the back and oscillate between taking the game extremely seriously and realizing that it’s really about friendship. And even though they don’t directly say it, it’s clear from the start that this place means almost everything to them.

This is their last game in a place they have been meeting every week during every long baseball season to engage in this ritual, and they now believe it is all coming to an end. As they play, occasionally someone comes just a little close to tears. But for the most part, they remain in the game. There is absolutely no discussion of finding another ballpark or building another ballpark, and there is only one mention of even getting together again at a bar for a meetup. Within this setting, it is assumed that once this ballpark goes away, this much camaraderie and closeness will never happen for them again.

The movie starts with the announcer and scorekeeper pretending that he is in a giant stadium with a loud speaker that echoes his voice. He says “today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth…” And it so happens the movie ends with these same words. These were the words of Lou Gerig in 1939 when he allowed a stadium full of Yankees fans give him the appreciation he deserved after the shocking news of his rapidly declining health. Gerig said:

“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

“When you look around, wouldn’t you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such a fine looking men as they’re standing in uniform in this ballpark today? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.”

We all deep down know why the scorekeeper repeats Lou Gerig’s words. It is because for all this time he’s been able to go to this one place, and he feels perfectly at home there. It is his place, and his friends’ place. The outside world doesn’t matter here. He can be at peace, and he is happy.

There aren’t many spectators. Two of the spectators, a couple of young guys, slowly get won over to the idea of baseball, but at first they’re hostile and they remain somewhat dubious as fans. Family members for the most part do not stay and watch. You see a couple of wives come, who appear to be tolerant of this ritual, but would like their men to be at home at a reasonable hour. At one point one of the guys gets hauled away by his brother, who screams at him that he needs to grow up and come to his niece’s christening, which is about to start. He resists, and there is a lot of swearing and struggling, but eventually he rides off to be a responsible grown-up.

There are a couple of kids who are shown watching the game. The boy asks the girl, why do they take this so seriously? Don’t they have anything else to do? The girl explains that they’re plumbers and the like. The implication is that they don’t have anything better to do, but after watching the entire movie, I don’t think it’s because the men don’t have more all-consuming jobs, although that might be the reason why they have the spare time to engage in this occupation. I think it’s because at this ballpark they’ve been engaging in the most important thing in life, something that’s more important than any job, whether one is a plumber or a medical doctor.

But the problem is, once the place is disturbed, for these men, the prospect of friendship is also disturbed if not destroyed. This might seem frustrating to those of us who are well integrated into the 21st century’s fast pace, the use of technology to communicate, those who think that friendship does not need place. When you have moved all over the place, when you telecommute, it gets hard to imagine why place should matter. But when you think about it, are most of your relationships as solid as these men’s? You might think, how strong is their friendship if it might end when the ballpark ends? However, these guys spend hours together every week, and know everything about each other‘s lives because they have the time to kibbitz about it. They are “men at work,” they have something to do here, and this brings them together. Their relationships are far deeper and more solid than most of ours.

When you think of it, we occupy certain places for certain periods of time, and those places can come to have precious significance to us, but we never think about what those places meant to other people who came before us. This is already strange, and a product of our relatively transient existence—we’re only alive for at the most about 100 years. We can live in a house for 30 years and not know anything about the people who lived in it before us. We can transform our little backyard into a garden or a putting green and we never think who tread that ground before us.

Like most of us who are not historians or genealogists, the baseball players too don’t have any consciousness of what the baseball field was doing before they started using it. The sense of history is important for embedded cultures, but that sense is not necessary to make a place special and irreducible. It takes people to do that, and the reason why the place is special is because of the human relations that have worked themselves out in that place over a long period of being together consistently, and seemingly permanently. That’s why when it’s over it feels like the relationships are also over.

Sometimes people do try to hang on to these moments in their lives. They try to re-create them. What if these guys had built their own baseball field and just continued to meet? Or more radically, what if they had continued to just meet up quarterly at a bar, or gotten on a Zoom call with each other once a month? These are not bad options, and I would feel proud of the guys if they did that. It has always seemed stupid to me how men in particular let go of their relationships. They mostly just don’t seem to have whatever it takes to foster solid friendships without being forced by some routine to work together or play together.

Because they don’t seem to have that capacity as frequently as women, the loss of place is particularly hard on men, I think. And that is exemplified by this movie, where these men have obviously deep and meaningful connections with each other, but they walk away from the game assuming that most of them will never even see each other again, or only in passing. I imagine when they pass, they’ll nod to each other, and they’ll get all internally misty-eyed, but they still won’t call or set up a meeting. They will just grieve, and they may never experience that kind of friendship and sense of belonging ever again. But they will consider themselves the luckiest men on the face of the earth because they did experience it. And they would be right.

Laurie M Johnson

[Source of Lou Gerig’s quote: “Luckiest Man.” Baseball Hall of Fame, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, 4 July 1939 (accessed 22 July 2025), baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/baseball-history/lou-gehrig-luckiest-man]

Photo from press kit: https://www.musicboxfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/EEPHUS-MBF-Press-Kit.pdf