Robert Krakoff

Burnout - Roxy Entertainment

Gavin "Popeye" Gridley is a lifetime minor league baseball player whose lackluster career is coming to a dead-end. Lacking education and work skills, he wants to do anything to remain in his world of baseball. Unfortunately, he lets his temper get the best of him, and instead, he ends up banned from baseball for life. On a remote and rural high school baseball field in Georgia, he spots Germaine Washington, an outsized African-American teenager playing a game of Burnout where the goal is to pitch as hard and as fast as possible. Germaine, it turns out, hates sports but is trying to beat a rival with his self-taught fastball. Gridley, at the end of his career, spots a young man at the start of his, and he knows a lethal fastball when he sees it. All Germaine wants is a ticket out of town, away from part-time robbery to feed his family, and a good education. The two men form a surprising partnership based on mutual needs and major league possibilities, but both find mistakes of the past still haunt their futures. More than a baseball story, it's a tale of human potential, unwavering determination, and ultimate burnout. It is a story of two men, very different, who come together through baseball to restore and repair their lives.

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