Shining a light on baseball under the midnight sun

You rarely see him, but you may depend on his work. He’s behind the camera on NESN. His Wellesley-based production company, Eye Candy Cinema, films and produces television features, pre- and postgame interviews, and just about everything but the actual play-by-play accounts. Away from the Sox, he makes shows like “Charlie Moore Outdoors.’’

But it’s his side project as a documentary filmmaker that’s separating Scharmer from the fold.

It all started in 2001 when the film “Summer Catch’’ was released. A Hollywood romantic comedy starring Freddy Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel, it told the story of a local boy who plays in the Cape Cod League and meets a rich girl whose family summers on the Cape. The movie wasn’t much of a critical success, and it was dreadfully unpopular among Cape residents and league officials.

“They weren’t all that psyched about how the league was portrayed,’’ said Scharmer in a recent interview at his kitchen table. “The league felt like they needed to tell the history of the league and the human interest stories that are always there every summer.’’

So Scharmer and three colleagues from the area got together and created “Touching the Game: The Story of the Cape Cod Baseball League’’ in 2004. The documentary took a top award at the 2005 Woods Hole Film Festival, and has been picked up by WGBH-TV, the PBS flagship in Boston, for airing over the next year and was recently featured as part of its fund-raising efforts.

While making the film, the producers interviewed several baseball coaches and players who shared their stories about playing baseball on Cape Cod, but also shared their experiences in a locale that’s just about as far away as you can get from the Cape - Alaska.

“I hadn’t heard of the Alaska Baseball League,’’ Scharmer admitted, but their stories intrigued him.

So, with the success of their Cape project, the filmmakers were off to the land of the midnight sun, where they spent time over the next four summers making “Touching the Game: Alaska,’’ which is due out this month.

Alaska was full of surprises, Scharmer said, starting with the heat. It gets to over 80 degrees in the middle of the summer - perfect baseball weather.

In Alaska, the summers are in near total sunlight and the winters in near constant darkness. One of the popular pastimes is the annual “Midnight Sun Game,’’ where teams compete at midnight with no artificial lights. Scharmer’s crew filmed the 100th anniversary of the game in 2006.

“People would have blankets hung over the windows just to try to get some semblance of nighttime,’’ he said. “Little kids were running around at 11:30 with their dogs. We came across people waterskiing at midnight.’’

The Alaska Baseball League consists of six teams from four areas in the state: the Kenai Peninsula Oilers; the Alaska Goldpanners and the Athletes in Action Fire from Fairbanks; the Mat-Su Miners; and the Bucs and the Glacier Pilots from Anchorage. Like the Cape Cod League, it is an amateur summer circuit that uses wooden bats and attracts top collegiate players from across the country, and it also has a number of big-league players among its alumni.

The roster of notable major leaguers who played in Alaska includes Dave Winfield, John Olerud, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Mark Grace. The Alaskan league’s Red Sox connection includes a former closer, Keith Foulke, who sealed the team’s 2004 World Series victory; Dave Roberts, who stole a key base to get them there; and current Red Sox players Jacoby Ellsbury, Jed Lowrie, and J.D. Drew. Sox manager Terry Francona and former bench coach Brad Mills, named as Houston Astros manager last week, also played there.

Mills’ son, Beau Mills, a top prospect in the Cleveland Indians organization, was one of the prominently featured players in “Touching the Game: Alaska.’’

The league also has some local players who look forward to the summer games all year.

“They all take ownership of their teams, for sure,’’ Scharmer said. “Guys from Alaska make great teammates for the guys that are just getting used to it all.’’

Alaska’s governor at the time, Sarah Palin, makes a brief appearance in the film, greeting players and throwing out the first pitch before one game. She sat down for an interview with the filmmakers, but the segment was cut from the final version.

“She’s very proud of Alaskan baseball,’’ said Scharmer. While the Palin footage was trimmed from the film, there is talk about including her interview in the DVD’s special features section.

The documentaries are a four-person operation. Scharmer is the director of photography and his Eye Candy Cinema business partner, Anthony Keel, coproduces, writes, and does audio. They team up with the two principals of a Newton-based operation, Fields of Vision, with Jim Carroll serving as coproducer, director and editor, and Peter Frechette handling sales and legal issues.

Scharmer got his start in film in 1988 when he strapped on a waterproof camera and dove to the bottom of the sea off Cape Cod to document the salvage of the pirate ship Whydah, which sank off Wellfleet in 1717. His underwater work led to a gig on the Discovery Channel doing some of their Shark Week coverage.

He met Keel about a decade later in Vail, Colo., where he was both a competitive skier and a producer of skiing-related films. He settled back in the Boston area in the late 1990s and has been doing work for NESN and other clients ever since.

Scharmer said he hopes to keep the “Touching the Game’’ series going, with a possible documentary on Little League baseball tentatively titled “Road to Williamsport,’’ named for the Pennsylvania town that hosts the annual Little League World Series.

The four business partners own and control their own films and hope to get bigger and better with each release.

“We’re getting there,’’ said Scharmer.

“Touching the Game: The Story of the Cape Cod Baseball League’’ is available at www.touchingthegame.com, where the Alaska documentary can be ordered in advance of its official release.

John M. Guilfoil can be reached at jguilfoil@globe.com.