Swampscott native Brendan Norton has always considered baseball “romantic.”

He played the sport in high school, playing first base, pitcher and outfield for the Big Blue. But as his baseball career ended, he’s found a new way to channel his love for the sport.

Norton, a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, created a 10-minute, 30-second documentary about baseball player Jonathan “Sunshine” Luders, a member of the Banana Ball League, made popular by the Savannah Bananas. 

Luders plays as an infielder for the Texas Tailgaters. He is known for batting and playing ball while riding a unicycle. 

“It’s kind of hard to forget someone riding a unicycle while playing baseball,” Norton said. 

Luders, a graduate of Lynnfield High School, played college baseball at Seton Hall University. Luders had played for the North Shore Navigators as well as in the Cape Cod League. 

Luders wanted to enter the Major League Baseball (MLB) Draft, but a knee injury sidelined him. He continued training and documenting his journey on social media. After seeing the Savannah Bananas play at Fenway Park, he decided to apply.

Now a little over a year after joining the Banana Ball League, Luders and his teammates will return to Massachusetts this weekend. The Loco Beach Coconuts will take on the Savannah Bananas at Gillette Stadium Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m.

Norton was able to spend a lot of his senior year at SCAD with Luders, piecing together “the untold story of Sunshine Luders.”

“I got super lucky. A good friend of mine, Jonah Cadorette, who’s also a Swampscott High School graduate, he was on a team with (Luders) on a travel ball team, and he actually reached out to me,” Norton said. “He was just the nicest guy of all time. It was really, really cool.”

Norton started making YouTube skits with his friends in the woods behind the middle school. In high school, he took classes with teachers JoE Douillette and Tom Reid on film making and media literacy.

“I was like, ‘This is what I definitely want to end up doing,’” Norton said. “I took a documentary class kind of on a whim (my junior year at SCAD) and was like, ‘This is so much more my thing than making a narrative short film.’ There was something about the boots on the ground vibe to it and the smaller crew.”

During his senior year, Norton had three quarters to complete the documentary. During the first quarter, “we were all about pre-production.” Norton gathered 

“I just did the most research I possibly could on a person,” Norton said. “I was looking up sketchy links of high school photos, just trying to find whatever I could from him but also probably bugging him to go through his camera roll and find any pictures he had with his family or whoever.”

Norton met with Luders, and he joked with the Swampscott Tides about how nervous he was for that first encounter.

“I think we ended up using maybe one sentence from a two and a half hour interview because I was just totally unprepared. But that was the best part. We had nine months to make it, so we were learning as we went,” Norton said. “If you learned what to ask next, it was all worth it.”

Now, Norton is interning in Durham, North Carolina with filmmaker Rahi Hasan. He’s trying to make connections and start his career.

Looking further ahead, Norton said he’d love to do his own projects again some day.

“I would absolutely love to somehow stay in the baseball world. It’s a very romantic sport, but it’s also a sport that’s really open to a lot of storytelling,” Norton said. “I just love baseball.”