“The Battered Bastards of Baseball” is a documentary that tells the story of Hollywood vet Bing Russell, father of actor Kurt Russell, a lifelong baseball fan who started the independent baseball Portland Mavericks.

As described by Indiewire.com: ”The resulting film is the documentary version of sports classics like “Slapshot” and “Major League,” where a rag tag, quirky bunch of outliers manage against all odds to inject their sport with a sense of high-spirited fun and anarchy.”

In 1972, the Triple A Portland Beavers had just moved to Spokane, which inspired Bing Russell, who had spent 13 seasons playing the Deputy on TV’s “Bonanza,” to drag his actor/baseball player son Kurt to Portland to create an independent team.

Former pro-baseball-player-turned-restaurant-manager, Frank Peters held open tryouts for players, attracting 300 hopefuls for Portland’s Maverick Baseball Team.

Directed by brothers Chapman Way and Maclain Way, who are grandsons of Bing and nephews of Kurt, the film is made up of interviews with Kurt Russell, Frank Peters, former players and Portland sportswriters, and former Mavs batboy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Todd Field, and archival footage.

In 1974, the year after Bing started the Mavericks, the team shattered minor league attendance record, and he was named Class A Baseball Executive of the Year, unprecedented for the owner of an independent team. Mavs players included Hank Robinson who later became an actor and played the angry umpire who ejected Frank Drebbin in “The Naked Gun,” and Rob Nelson who invented Big League Chew gum. In 1975, former Yankees great Jim Bouton came out of retirement to pitch as a Maverick.

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More on More on Frank Peters and The Battered Bastards of Baseball

The Battered Bastards of Baseball, which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, is purportedly about the Portland Mavericks, a minor-league baseball team that thrived in the 1970s, a time when it was the only professional club in the nation not owned by a Major League Baseball franchise. But it’s really about a bunch of mavericks—has-beens and never-weres whose love of baseball was exceeded only by a passion for inverting it.

While the star of the film is Mavericks owner Bing Russell, an actor who was the father of actor Kurt Russell (who played for the team), the leading light is Peters, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Oregon boy who managed the team, lived by basic idioms—“Make sure the people who hate your guts are separated from those who haven’t made up their minds”—and once had to hire a bodyguard to protect him from his own players.