Playing baseball under 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 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 sets Scharmer apart.

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 on among Cape residents and league officials.

“They weren’t all that psyched about how the league was portrayed,’’ said Scharmer in an 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 said, and 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 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 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.’’

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 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.

For more information about the filmmakers and their baseball projects, go to www.touchingthegame.com.