On May 15, 2025, during the TV broadcast of the Dodgers/Athletics game, play-by-play announcer Joe Davis and color commentator Eric Karros filled the dead space with conversation as Dodgers outfielder Andy Pages walked up to the batter box. This isn’t unusual; baseball is a sport of swift action broken up by periods of stillness that commentators have to fill. Even with the recent addition of a pitch clock, which introduced a fluidity to the game’s rhythm, there’s still plenty of time for contemplation. But the tenor of this conversation was more existential than most. Davis and Karros discussed how people experience the passage of time, with Davis explaining that children experience time more slowly than adults do, because for children, every experience is new and exciting. Adults, the theory goes, feel the passage of time more quickly; experience breeds familiarity, and with it a tendency to fly through life.
On the broadcast, Karros pauses for a second. “I like that theory, but I’m looking for the, uh, how to slow down time.”
“You gotta find stuff that’s novel,” says Davis.
“Am I gonna feel any better?” asks Karros, and then, “Am I gonna be able to run again?” His second question is so soft that it almost disappears under the roar of the crowd.
And then Pages smashes a three-run home run. Davis switches gears to deliver the play-by-play. The Dodgers went on to beat the Athletics 18-3. Existential crisis over, at least until the next slow moment.
*
Most things, in and of themselves, can be turned into suitable metaphors for life because they’re inextricable from lived experience. Any concrete object can be a metaphor. But nothing captures the ebb and flow of the rhythms of life itself quite like baseball does, because the sport contracts and dilates time as it’s being played, an experience that can’t be boiled down only to exciting developments on the field. Baseball is slow ebbs and swift surges, a sport of opposing forces thrown together into harmony. It’s bittersweet and optimistic; the territory of upstart children and aging adults alike, a way to be romantic about stats and charts.
The conversation between Davis and Karros resonates because it’s two men at different stages of coming to terms with the arc of their own lives, all in front of the backdrop of a sport that illustrates their point. When Karros, himself a former ballplayer, asks, “Am I gonna feel any better?” it’s both a practical question—will I heal enough to be able to run again?—and an existential one—will I ever come to grips with my own mortality? In the in-between moments, Karros asks the questions we all do. Baseball is about action and contemplation, strategy tempered by instinct, a way to work out vast issues within the friendly confines of the diamond. Davis and Karros approach the problem of aging from a place of uncertainty and experience.
Two movies, Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) and Eephus (2024), approach the same issue from the different vantage points of youth and age, respectively. Both films take place at a turning point in the season. Eephus occurs over the course of one day at a small-town Massachusetts baseball diamond in mid-October, the sharp reds of the trees against the hard blue of the sky betraying the chill of the season. Spiritually, it’s the end of the summer. The Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, two recreational teams, have convened for one final game. The ballpark will be removed to make way for a new middle school. Eephus is a melancholy portrait of a dying game in a quiet town, the whole world settling in for the gentle decay of autumn and late middle age. By contrast, Everybody Wants Some!! spans the final weekend before college classes begin, the warm glow of Texas summer not yet gone, and the ball players are young and exuberant; they’re on the cusp of something bright and new, a fresh kind of freedom courtesy of their athletic ability. Both films explore groups of men who are devoted to their sport, and who have yet to figure out the rest of their own lives. The game functions as a prism through which they understand their own circumstances.
The ball players of Everybody Wants Some!! are college students, with incoming freshman pitcher Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) serving as the primary point-of-view character in the ensemble: director Richard Linklater’s one concession to a traditional narrative in an otherwise laconic slice-of-life hangout movie. Jake is one of the newest team members, all of whom have been thrown together in a pair of terribly-kept houses just off campus, left to their own devices for their final weekend of summer before classes begin. (Their housing can almost be smelled through the screen: stale beer and gym socks and weed and cigarettes, the bare walls and mattresses directly on the floor serving as proof that here be college boys.) They’re young and strong and athletic; college doesn’t so much loom over their futures as it peeks around the corner at them, flirtatious and inviting. Everything is about either sex or baseball; one character, motormouthed Finn (Glen Powell), even complains to his teammates at a party that whenever they’re on the baseball diamond, they can’t talk about anything other than sex, and whenever they’re out partying, they can’t talk about anything other than baseball. Either way, the team seeks out adventure—there’s always another play, another dance partner, another opportunity to score.
Jake, Finn, and their teammates embody Joe Davis’s description of time from the youthful end of the spectrum. Everything goes fast and keeps on coming, fresh and beautiful and kinetic. The final weekend of the summer is an excuse to jam as many parties as they possibly can into their fleeting days before classes—and the rest of life—get in the way of their game. Despite summer’s impending end, there’s no room for melancholy in the schedule. There’s too much fun to be had first.
The ball players in Eephus find themselves at the opposite end of their prime, most of them middle-aged and feeling more melancholy than usual about it. Their scorekeeper Franny (Cliff Blake) has seen just about everything. We don’t get to see all of the game, though it feels like we do; co-writer/director Carson Lund gives us only the in-between moments, the stretches of waiting between the ball being caught and the next time the ball’s thrown. Eephus skips from player to player, resting in the space between moments of activity on the field. There’s no one central character, no arc, no thrust.
There’s hardly even a plot: a group of men play ball on a field scheduled for demolition in a game that stretches to mythic length. Time speeds up, slips through their grasp. Suddenly it’s dusk and the umpire needs to go home. It’s all going by too quickly, the embodiment of Eric Karros’ question: how do I slow down time? The players in Eephus seek out the novel in the familiar, clinging to the sport they know and love as if it’s going to save them. The only throughline is the game itself, driven by the players’ need to keep going until it’s done, in spite of their fatigue and the failing light.
*
Baseball is a game of drops in buckets, individual plays collecting into a record through slow accretion over time. A home run or an error are individually noteworthy; individual balls and strikes and catches less so, though each individual play does matter in the grand scheme of things. Usually you have a good idea of how a game might play out, provided you’re going late enough in the season. But there’s always room for something different, something new. Anything that can happen will happen, given enough time. String together enough strikes in a short amount of time and you’ve got a perfect no-hitter. String together a few less and throw in a walk or a hit or two and you’ve got a pretty average game. The White Sox will be bad, the Rockies even worse. Andy Pages will hit a three-run homer while Joe Davis and Eric Karros contemplate the meaning of time and mortality.
Going to a baseball game only for the exciting plays misses the point entirely. Baseball isn’t baseball without the mundane in the middle. Eephus is built around the idea of slowness, so much so that the movie takes its name from a slow curve pitch. “Stays in the air forever,” says Merritt (Nate Fisher), one of the pitchers. “You get bored watching it…the eephus makes [the batter] lose track of time.” One of the other players (Conner Marx) compares the eephus pitch to the game as a whole: “I’m looking around for something to happen, and poof, game’s over.” The boredom invites contemplation, but it also speeds up time. Rather than watch the action, we watch players in between plays, caught ruminating in the field. Cinematographer Greg Tango opens the story with a fade from black onto the field in the predawn light, as though the movie could take on the pace of life itself, waking up slowly in the fading mist. The story fades out in the same fashion: time slips away too quickly even while the game goes on to a legendary length. An otherwise mundane game stretches onward as though it can grasp eternity.
Conversely, time expands in Everybody Wants Some!!. The late summer afternoons stretch, the inverse of Eephus’s long game in a short day. Jake and Finn and the rest of the team have the time to do more than should fit properly in a day, and none of them seem to be in a hurry about any of it. Linklater’s pacing ambles affably along, though it doesn’t dawdle. The team doesn’t stand around. Even when they’re hanging out, they’re doing something: filling a waterbed with the garden hose, playing ping-pong, primping for the next party. Time runs more slowly for them, and they expand their activities to fill it. They go out partying every night. A disco club, a country bar, a party hosted at their house, a punk show, a party hosted by the theater kids off campus. When someone picks a fight and gets the whole team thrown out of the disco, it doesn’t matter all that much, since the country bar’s just down the street, and getting in simply requires a change of clothes. On to the next new thing, the opportunity to try on new identities with each new location. “You gotta find stuff that’s novel,” as Joe Davis says.
The changes of clothes shift the way the ballgame does with each ballpark. Not enough to make the game completely different, but just enough to introduce some novelty. Every ballpark has its peculiarities that must be brought into account: the ivy in the outfield at Wrigley Field, the altitude at Coors Stadium, the Green Giant at Fenway Park. The boys in Everybody Wants Some!! are on the move, always. New ballpark, new house rules, a new way to exist in the world.
Eephus takes place in one location: Soldier’s Field, the only ballpark in the only town that its characters are willing to play in. A bystander suggests that the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint teams could play at another ballpark in a neighboring town after Soldier’s Field is decommissioned, and the players refuse; they love their game, but they hate going to the neighboring town more. They’re stuck in place and time. It wouldn’t matter if they played anywhere else anyway. “It’s just one big backyard,” says Adler’s Paint pitcher Ed (Keith William Richards). “My backyard.” He’s seen it all, and to him, it’s all the same. Tango frames the men in the dugout like portraits just this side of Norman Rockwell—faces craggy, brows squinted, each player lined up in the middle distance just so. The compositions are beautifully static, players frozen in time and space as they watch their teammates walk up to the batter’s box. Deeper in the background, beyond the baseball field, other people play faster sports–the jabs of boxing, the steady lull of jogging, and the fluid weaving of soccer.
The lack of motion in Eephus is part of the rhythm of baseball, though the game has also taken its physical toll on the players. “I used to be pretty fast in my heyday,” says outfielder Chuck (Theodore Bouloukos), “but I think this is it for me.” For some (including Chuck), it hurts just to go out on to the field. They’re cranky about it. This is perhaps the last game most of these characters will ever get to play, and even though it’s painful for them to play it, none of them want to give it up. When dusk falls, they talk about forfeiting, having a beer at home, calling it a wash. But they can’t leave yet. It isn’t their time. They’re honor-bound, duty-bound, or—in some cases—peer-pressured into sticking around until the final play of the game: Sisyphus doing laps around the baseball diamond.
Despite their constant motion, the boys of Everybody Wants Some!! are also caught in a Sisyphean task, though they seem to get more enjoyment out of it than the men of Eephus. Jake and Finn and the rest are on a mission with alternating goals: play ball and play the dating field. The night isn’t complete until they’ve managed to pull a girl. The day isn’t over unless they’ve played a game. Both tasks reset in the morning. Another ball, another party, another boulder. Some of their teammates take on each day with serene acceptance, like team stoner Willoughby (Wyatt Russell). Others, like Jay (Justin Street) are wound tighter with every passing competition. Not only does he feel obligated to roll the boulder, he has to be the best at doing it. His competitive spirit gets him in trouble with the rest of the team. For most, partying is an outlet for the competitiveness of baseball, and baseball is an outlet for the pressures of life, but Jay hasn’t found the release valve yet. His personal boulder keeps getting bigger.
But most of the teammates take the turns in stride. Glen Powell’s Finn is a golden retriever, eager for the next party, the next dance, the next game. For his own part, Jake is quietly philosophical. He’d even written about Sisyphus and baseball for his college application essay. He thinks, instead of the suffering they’d intended, that the gods “blessed him with something to focus on, you know, something he could potentially find meaning in … It’s a gift to be striving at all, you know, even if it looks futile to others.” Everybody Wants Some!! finds meaning in the churn. Finn’s an upperclassman, Jake’s a freshman, and other young rookies will join the team after Jake in years to come. The cycle might not be as new for the older teammates, but it’s new and fresh for somebody else. Jake looks for the groove of the game, whether good or bad. Pitch a strike or pitch a home run—it’s all an opportunity to learn. For him, the learning’s still novel. Time slows down, and there’s plenty left in store. He can revel in it.
For the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, time has run out. The umpire leaves, the sun sets, and the lights on the field won’t work. Every inning is longer than the last, as though time itself has sped up. The players knew they were looking over the edge at the end when they started the game, and the end keeps signaling itself. You can go home. You can quit. You can put your feet up and drink a beer and nurse the aches and pains that will make getting out of bed the following morning that much harder. But they collectively refuse. One tries to quit, and another shouts him down, “You can’t call it now. The whole game would be pointless!”
The angry reply: “It was already pointless!” Every trip around the diamond, every walk to the batter’s box, is another attempt to roll the boulder up the hill once again. When the game finally does end, it’s in the dark. Squashed beer cans cast long shadows across the dirt floor of the dugout, the ground looking as desolate as the surface of the moon. One player sets off fireworks. We never see them; we just see the flash of colored lights on the dugout, a celebration of the season that was. The boulder will keep rolling back down its hill; someone else will start rolling it right back up. Maybe not here, but in another small-town ballpark elsewhere, until they too have to give up the sport. The ball players will keep beating back the dark. All things must end. But then again, all things must begin again, too.