“The nothing nothings.”
— Martin Heidegger
In July 1929, a young, ambitious, and controversial philosopher named Martin Heidegger gave his inaugural address at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Entitled “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger’s lecture was not intended to lay out an academic program, but, rather, to stimulate fresh thinking. Indeed, with this in mind, he turned to the peculiar subject of “nothing.” Since the time of the ancient Greeks, Western philosophy had fixated on what can be known and understood — on something. Heidegger would do just the opposite. As he famously asks, “What is the nothing?”
The answer to this question, it turns out, is rooted in how human beings experience the world. For example, in the conditioned environment of a scientific lab, it is possible to analyze things in a calm, detached manner. Yet, under extreme circumstances, things appear differently. On a battlefield, in an emergency room, the everyday seemingly disappears. The world is threatened by nothingness. What normally matters to human beings recedes into the background. What normally is ignored or even suppressed (death, suffering, the very meaning of life) is suddenly of paramount importance.
A little more than a decade after Heidegger’s lecture, journeyman right-handed pitcher Truett “Rip” Sewell began experimenting with a long-forgotten, three-fingered pitch. Already in his mid-30s, Sewell was on the verge of concluding an unremarkable career. He had nothing to lose. So, instead of firing fastballs or snapping off curveballs, Sewell began lobbing pitches up to 25 feet in the air before they descended towards home plate. Not even his own teammates on the Pittsburgh Pirates were impressed. Outfielder Maurice Van Robays, who drove in 116 runs in 1940, argued that Sewell’s pitch would prove insignificant: “Eephus ain’t nothing,” Van Robays said, “and that’s a nothing pitch.”
As Van Robays presumably knew, the words “eephus” and “nothing” are connected: the Hebrew term efes (אפס) means “nothing” or “zero.” Hence, as Van Robays saw it, Sewell’s new efes pitch did not merit particular attention. Yet, if he had read Heidegger, he might have known better. The pitch’s very lack of velocity — the leisurely way that it approaches the hitter — actually induces anxiety. Most hitters simply want to react to the baseball, but the eephus pitch makes them think and, in doing so, manifests the pressure they are otherwise trying to suppress. Sewell grasped this point. He rode the eephus pitch for eight more seasons in the big leagues, including 21-win seasons in 1943 and 1944, respectively.
Nevertheless, only a handful of pitchers have thrown the eephus since Sewell’s day. Lanky, left-handed reliever Steve Hamilton featured his “Folly Floater” late in his lengthy career (1961-72). Pascual Peréz, best known for his tenure with the Montreal Expos (1987-89), would occasionally deploy his arc-en-ciel (rainbow) pitch before ebullient crowds at Olympic Stadium. More recently, Zack Greinke and Yu Darvish, both of whom have a chance to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, have surprised hitters with the occasional eephus. It may be a “nothing pitch,” but there is something to it all the same.
With that in mind, it is tempting to connect the pitch’s curious history with the new critically acclaimed baseball movie “Eephus.” Indeed, while the pitch itself does not figure heavily in the film’s plot, the very concept of eephus does. Co-written and directed by New Hampshire native Carson Lund, “Eephus” is set in Douglas, Mass. — a small town about an hour southwest of Boston.
The plot centers on a pair of men’s league baseball teams (Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs) that face each other in a late-October showdown at the (real-life) local landmark Soldiers Field. To all appearances, this is a normal Sunday men’s league game. The vibe is relaxed, the competition middling (at best), the crowd small and generally languid. But there is a rub. This is set to be the very last game ever played at Soldiers Field. Worcester County has decided to demolish the ballpark and, in its place, build a new middle school. The community’s ritual of Sunday baseball is going “the way of all the earth.”
The question that “Eephus” forces us to wrestle with is: Who cares? We’re watching bad baseball played by gruff and unremarkable men. Isn’t the whole thing meaningless — just a big “nothing”? For much of the film, this would seem to be the case. The game languishes on. Players (even umpires) come and go. There are no heroes, just zeroes, including the fans who idly pass the afternoon at Soldiers Field. And then something happens or, better yet, something is taken away. The light wanes, and evening falls.
The players are cast in shadow, slowly but surely giving way to the obscurity of night. But the encroachment of darkness — the beginning of the end, the looming presence of the nothing — actually rouses the players. They refuse to quit, even as the game stretches into extra innings. In desperation, they use car headlights to illuminate the field. In this way, the changing light becomes a visual metaphor for endings writ large: not just of a game or a field, but of life itself.
In its nothingness, the eephus pitch creates anxiety, even urgency. So it is with “Eephus’” final game at Soldiers Field. It means nothing, it means everything. This paradox affects everyone on the field — the exhausted pitcher, the pissed-off veteran, the torpid benchwarmer. Indeed, Lund’s film refuses to focus on a gallant protagonist who wrestles victory from the jaws of defeat. On the contrary, the character arc belongs to the group, to everyone on the field. That is not to suggest that the players are all the same. Yet, in continuing to compete, they all share a common opponent — the night, the nothing, the eephus.
The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., features an exhibit called “Baseball at the Movies.” A number of films are highlighted, from “The Pride of the Yankees” (1942) to “The Bad News Bears” (1976) to “Bull Durham” (1988). According to Sean Burns, who reviews films for NPR member station WBUR-FM in Boston, “Eephus” belongs among their hallowed ranks: “It’s the best baseball movie since “Bull Durham” … because it explores this sport’s peculiar ability to bend and distort time. As the shadows on Soldiers Field get longer, an elegiac ache settles in. “Eephus” is more than a movie about a game, it’s about reaching a time in your life when it feels like it’s getting late earlier and earlier.” Peter Travers, longtime critic for Rolling Stone, puts it even more strongly: “Nothing and everything happens in “Eephus,” until you realize that you’ve just spent one hour and 36 minutes getting lost in one of the best damn baseball movies ever made.”
For my own part, I doubt that most viewers will be as quick as Burns and Travers to compare “Eephus” to bona fide baseball classics such as “The Natural” (1984) and “Moneyball” (2011). Lund’s film is simply too loose, too unhurried, and ultimately too melancholic to give it mass appeal. Yet, as Heidegger might have observed, herein lies the film’s strange power. “Eephus” comes in quietly and slowly, but don’t let its self-effacement fool you. The nothing nothings.
