Carson Lund made Eephus, the best baseball movie in recent memory

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Bullseye, we talk to Carson Lund, director of the new slice-of-life baseball film, Eephus. The movie is about two rec league baseball teams meeting to play their final game on a field, which will be torn down the next day to make way for a middle school. Lund talks to Bullseye about representing downtime in baseball, and rejecting the grand finale you might expect in a movie about a sport.

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0:00.0	Decades ago, Brazilian women made a discovery.
0:03.9	They could have an abortion without a doctor, thanks to a tiny pill.
0:08.6	That pill spawned a global movement, helping millions of women have safe abortions regardless of the law.
0:16.3	Hear that story on the network from NPR's Embedded and Futuro Media, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25.3	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:31.9	Hey! I'm Jesse Thorne.
0:46.6	A few weeks back, I went to the movie theater.
0:49.0	I saw a movie called Ephes.
0:52.0	Here's the premise.
0:53.2	It's a small New England town, the 90s or whatever. It doesn't say
0:59.1	exactly. And the whole thing takes place over the course of one day. Two rec league baseball teams
1:05.4	meet up to play a game in a place called Soldiers Field. It's the end of the season. Tomorrow, they're bulldozing the
1:13.3	field to make way for not some developers' condominiums, but instead a middle school. So this is
1:23.7	the last game on the field. And for some of the older guys, it's probably their last
1:27.8	game ever. They're not going to drive to the next town over. That's the premise. And if I am
1:33.8	being honest, it is also basically the synopsis of the film. Nothing much happens in Ephis.
1:40.8	Nobody is putting up any real fight against the middle school because I mean they're not jerks
1:45.7	the film's highest stakes are basically who's going to win the river dogs or adler's paint
1:53.0	are you sold yet because you should be it's honestly a stunning movie beautiful beautiful, funny, a little sad.
2:03.1	In her New York Times review, Alyssa Wilkinson called Ephis a baseball movie but not a sports movie.
2:09.4	That feels really appropriate.
2:12.0	Baseball can burn slowly, to quote one of the players from the film,
	...

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