Attaining big-screen success is no easy feat. Yet, with their new baseball film Eephus, Stephen Radochia and Nate Fisher, BC ’15, stepped up to the plate.
“It’s been a very, very, very surreal ride,” Fisher said.
Eephus, lauded as the “best baseball movie since ‘Moneyball’” by the Associated Press, tells the story of the final face-off between two New England recreational baseball teams—the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint—before their field is demolished to build a school.
Released on March 7, the film was nominated for awards at a variety of film festivals, including Cannes. It also won “Best Screenplay” at the 2024 Silk Road International Film Festival in China.
In the film, Radochia, an administrative assistant in Boston College’s art, art history, and film department, stars as Graham Morris, a player on the Riverdogs. Fisher co-wrote the screenplay and plays Merritt Nettles, a player on Adler’s Paint.
Stephen Radochia
Stephen Radochia believes he is a much better baseball player in his 40s than he was at 14.
“In ninth grade, in high school, I really was wanting to make the baseball team, so I didn’t audition for the spring musical, but I actually got cut from the baseball team, so that didn’t work out,” Radochia said.
But everything did work out—albeit decades later—with Eephus, during which Radochia was able to act and play baseball simultaneously.
Radochia, who grew up and currently lives in Arlington, Mass., said his interest in theater began in elementary school.
“From a young age, I was always interested in acting, and I think it was because of certain movies—like the original Star Wars trilogy, probably like, you know, opened up my mind,” Radochia said. “I think that movies were something that resonated with me as a young kid, so that’s where my interest in acting probably started.”
In high school, Radochia took drama classes and acted in three musicals—The Boy Friend, Mame, and Godspell—before attending Providence College, where he majored in theatre.
At Providence, Radochia threw himself into the theater department, acting throughout the school year and summer, working tech crew, and even directing a few one-act plays.
After graduating in 1997, Radochia worked as an associate in the Boston Lyric Opera’s subscription office. At the same time, he was auditioning for plays on the side, landing roles in a variety of Shakespere productions, including Troilus and Cressida, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and As You Like It.
In his late 20s, Radochia moved to New York, where he continued to live and act until 2007.
“Before my wife and I got married, we were doing long distance,” Radochia said. “ And my wife—actually when she was just 30 years old—she had to have open heart surgery. And I was still living in New York, and she was up [in Boston], so I moved back.”
During his wife’s recovery period, Radochia shifted away from the time-intensive demands of theater and moved into film—a more flexible venture.
“It was kind of perfect for me, because it was a one-day part or a two-day part,” Radochia said. “You’re just filming it on the weekend, and I was still able to take my wife to her physical therapy appointments or doctor’s appointments.”
His first feature was a film written and directed by an MIT grad student 25 years ago. Since then, he’s acted in a variety of works including Ephemeral, an Emerson College short film that was featured at Cannes Film Festival, and Eulogy, for which he won Best Actor at a Brandeis film festival.
But, for Radochia, Eephus is a career highlight.
“Without a doubt that’s the highest profile thing I’ve ever done, and it’s been an amazing experience,” Radochia said.
He discovered Eephus through Backstage, an online platform for actors and casting calls.
“I remember the date,” Radochia said. “It was August 12, 2021. My wife was out, and my son was five, and he had just gone to bed. And so I was like, ‘Oh, let me go take a look on Backstage—let me just see what’s out there because I’m kind of always on the hunt for something.’”
Immediately, a baseball film caught his eye.
“I was like, ‘This sounds amazing,’” Radochia said.
Radochia reached out to the film’s producer. He auditioned via Zoom a few days later and quickly heard back.
“He literally emailed me at nine o’clock that night saying, ‘I know this is kind of going fast, but we would love to cast you,’” Radochia said. “Which was awesome, because it wasn’t a callback, it was all happening really quickly.”
Though production was initially planned for Oct. 2021, the company decided not to rush the process and pushed filming back to Oct. 2022.
“Very early on, I told my wife it felt special, and I had a lot of confidence in the filmmakers and the writers,” Radochia said.
Russell Gannon, who played Riverdogs player Bill Belinda and has worked with Radochia in past films, believes the bond between the baseball team was genuine, not just acted for the screen.
“You really start to develop this teammate sort of feeling while you’re filming,” Gannon said.
For Radochia, the filming experience and the film’s success is unforgettable.
“To have this high point happen in my late 40s is just really awesome,” Radochia said. “I’m just very grateful and appreciative of this all happening.”
Chris Goodwin, who played Garret Furnivall, said Radochia’s success is well-deserved.
“He deserves it,” Goodwin said. “He’s an incredible actor, and he’s an even better human being.”
Nate Fisher
Though Radochia didn’t know it when he landed a role in Eephus, he shared a unique connection with one of the film’s writers, Nate Fisher—both were part of the BC community.
Fisher grew up in Providence, R.I., before attending BC, where he triple-majored in history, philosophy, and film.
Though he had acted as a child—only once, in a local production of A Christmas Carol at his mother’s insistence—Fisher’s true interest in performance did not develop until his senior year of high school.
“Something happened in between applying to colleges and getting into/rejected from several where I decided that I wanted to make movies, I wanted to be in movies,’” Fisher said. “That wasn’t on my radar at all when I was applying to college.”
Fisher credits this realization to American filmmaker David Lynch.
“This is kind of like the cliche where you watch a David Lynch movie and it changes your life,” Fisher said. “But it really did happen to me, and it was just like, trajectory forever altered after I saw Mulholland Drive. I was like, ‘This is all I want to do in life.’”
At BC, explored his interest in performance through his film major, wrote a column for The Heights, and participated in the sketch comedy group Hello…Shovelhead!
Fisher credits Hello…Shovelhead! for helping him develop his comedic and storytelling skills.
“Did I write anything funny?” Fisher said. “Probably not. I don’t know if I would go back and look at those sketches and be like, ‘Boy, oh boy.’ But I learned a lot about how to write, writing sketches for that and acting too.”
But according to Fisher, his most valuable film education came from experiences outside the classroom.
“Boston is blessed with a lot of great, great, great theaters for movies,” Fisher said. “I would go and watch hundreds of movies a year from all far-flung corners of the world and through all the periods of film history. I learned so much watching those movies.”
After graduating from BC in 2015, Fisher worked an office job for a year before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film. The move was not without its challenges, though.
“It was a very, very strange period,” Fisher said. “I worked in a grocery store, and then at night, I would take the bus 90 minutes to go do stand-up comedy open mics and then take it 90 minutes back after I bombed. It was a lonesome and alienating experience.”
Eventually, Fisher connected with people who would become his writing partners and close friends.
One of those people was Carson Lund, whom Fisher had first met during his time at BC.
“We would meet at the Harvard Film Archive,” Fisher said. “When I say ‘meet,’ we did not know each other, but we would go to the Harvard Film Archive, and I would see him across the theater, and I’d be like, ‘Hey, that’s the only guy here that’s under the age of 50.’”
After reconnecting in LA and becoming friends, Lund approached Fisher with an exciting opportunity.
“‘I want to make my first movie,’” Lund told Fisher. “‘I need you to write it with me because I want it to be funny and I want it to be a baseball movie.’”
Fisher was hooked—but gave Lund one condition: He wanted to act in the film too.
Lund agreed, and Fisher joined the project, co-writing the script and playing a character named Meritt Nettles, a character he partially based on MLB pitcher Zack Greinke.
Before Eephus, Fisher had written pilots before, and had worked on his podcast, “A Closer Look,” but this marked his first time writing a feature script.
Eephus was uniquely structured, with the entire film taking place during a single baseball game.
“As we were starting to conceive of the characters and conceive of the things that might happen in it, we were spending as much time on the actual baseball game itself,” Fisher said. “We had to make sure that the movie worked as a baseball game before it worked as a movie.”
That task came naturally to Fisher.
“He’s like an encyclopedic encyclopedia for film,” Goodwin said. “He knows everything about film.”
The film showcased much more than Fisher’s film knowledge, though.
“All three writers were definitely key components to it, but I do think Nate’s sense of humor—you can definitely see it at times,” Radochia said.
Gannon also emphasized Fisher’s humor.
“Once I get to know him, talk to him behind the scenes, and learn about his love of comedy and all that—that’s when I really get to know him well,” Gannon said.
Fisher believes his first endeavor into feature filmmaking was a success.
“That was my first real, big swing,” Fisher said. “And it couldn’t have gone better. I’m really happy with how it turned out.”
Out of the Park
In addition to their shared BC connection—and the fun fact that Radochia’s character’s name, Graham, is the same as Fisher’s legal first name—Radochia and Fisher share a strong sense of pride in the film’s success.
“None of us are famous, but I really feel like there’s no weak links in this film, and that’s what I really think is amazing,” Radochia said.
Fisher echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that Lund was a first-time director and the three screenwriters, including himself, were writing their first screenplay.
“For this movie to get not just distribution in theaters, but critical acclaim worldwide, is very, very, very baffling on one level because people don’t expect it,” Fisher said.
Beyond its accolades, the film’s success holds deeper meaning for Fisher—reminding viewers of the value of community.
“The movie is an important tribute to the value of sustaining communal spaces and the value of the work that goes into keeping a group identity together,” Fisher said.
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