Hiroshi Watanabe grew up in Japan dreaming of playing first base and clobbering home runs like the great slugger Sadaharu Oh.

Then he discovered Robert Frank.

Mr. Watanabe took a job at a Los Angeles production company in 1975 and never once looked back to the baseball diamond. In time, he went on to do portraiture in Ecuador and stills of a brick factory in Udaipur, India. In fact, he had never taken a single sports photo until last year, when he was invited to be among a group of photographers to document the 2013 season of the Durham Bulls, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Triple-A affiliate immortalized in the film “Bull Durham.”

The resulting exhibit and book, “Bull City Summer,” will debut at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Sunday, in time to mark the film’s 25th anniversary. Among the other participating photographers are Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas and Kate Joyce.

In some way, Mr. Watanabe’s lack of experience photographing sports, as well as not being from the South, gave him a different perspective.

“Documenting the game itself has been done many, many times,” said Mr. Watanabe, 62. “I decided to focus on the mechanics, how everything works together, besides the baseball players.”

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Mr. Watanabe looked for people and places away from the crowds and faint lights of Triple-A baseball: aluminum shower stalls, idle bullpen blockades, dirt-sod cleats, creased mitts, dusty ball caps and the methodical layout of a trainer’s instruments, arranged, he said, “like a doctor’s tool set before surgery.” There is a quiet tenderness to his pictures, like in one where a jersey hanging in a locker stall shrouds a baby’s sonogram (Slide 5).

Three photographs in particular depict the manual scoreboard operator at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, perched on a stool, as he is at every home game, watching each and every play through a window overlooking left field, shuffling large plexiglass numbers when a run is scored.

“He sits in the dark surrounded by numbers,” Mr. Watanabe said. “That is what he does every day.”

In the entire collection, Mr. Watanabe’s favorite photograph is of one consistently weathered and fractured digit in the scoreboard operator’s arsenal: zero.

“He must have had 20 zeros in that room; each and every single one was cracked,” he said.

Zero is the only number to stay outside, in view, every day, braving all the elements, including through the winter, when not a cleat touches the grass.

“It is indicative of the passage of time,” Mr. Watanabe said. “As long as there is no score, it all stays the same.”

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“Bull City Summer” will be on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh beginning Feb. 23 through Aug. 31.

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