How the Cowriters of Eephus Made the Best Sports Movie of the Decade

The other aspect of it that I really latch onto is, we have 150 years of [baseball] history. So, it’s not really a coincidence that baseball, even at minor levels, is played by the weirdest people in the history of humanity. The weirdest people of all time play baseball, and there’s thousands of them. We even have one of them in our movie. One of the most idiosyncratic, iconic people to ever play the game, Bill Lee.

How did you guys get him to be in the movie?

Lund: When we decided that the eephus was central to the film—both as a pitch itself and also as a structuring metaphor for the film—that’s when we were like, well, we need to find someone who has thrown this pitch famously. Zack Greinke was our model for a contemporary pitcher who still throws it. Nate sort of modeled his performance after him, I should add. But I really wanted someone who was a mystic from baseball’s past to come into the game and throw this pitch, and then leave these players sort of stranded and wondering what comes next. I thought of many different people for this and we actually tried to reach out to many of those people, and it is difficult, obviously. Any old baseball player has many layers of defense before you can actually talk to them. There’s an agent or a manager or whatever, and they do all these public speaking appearances.

Bill is, thankfully, just devoid of all of that. He lives on a farm in upstate Vermont, right near the border of Canada, and has a landline and he answers it. He does not duck calls, and we maintained a phone correspondence for about a year before shooting. He basically said yes the minute I first spoke with him, and claims to have read the script that day by going to the library and opening up the computer. He called me two hours later after I sent him the script and was like, “Yeah, yeah, the light goes down and all of it. All that stuff. Yeah, it’s great.”

He has one of my favorite lines too, when he says that strikeouts are “fascist.” Is that something he actually thought or did you guys write that for him?

Lund: He said that! It’s actually in his book.

Fisher: He takes credit for that and claims that Ron Shelton put that in Bull Durham because of him. He said that on set a lot. We had written some very specific lines for him. I was very proud of those lines.

Lund: They were good.

Fisher: He goes, “Nobody puts words in my mouth. I’m not reading this.” Eventually, he got a little tired and was like, “What are my lines?” So, we gave them to him. But he would ad lib and put stuff in. We were almost 100% doctrinaire about having no cultural references in it. Nothing to pin it in time or reference the outside world, and certainly, certainly not anything that directly references a better baseball movie. We had to make sure he wasn’t completely stealing lines from Bull Durham.

Lund: I’m comfortable with the hang-out movie term. There are a number that we looked at, and I think we maintained a list of films that were inspirational. Definitely some Howard Hawks films, who I would consider an early master of the hang-out film, without it even being called that at the time.