On trips across the country, while others scouted the competition, Cardenas’s family visited the local sights. One tournament in the Midwest took them to the Badlands and a stop at the well-known biker rally in Sturgis, S.D.

“Sometimes we got funny looks because baseball was never the most important thing to our family,” Cardenas’s mother, Aida Rubio, said.

By high school, her son was a coveted prospect, and he was selected with the 37th pick by the Philadelphia Phillies in the 2006 draft. Early in his minor league career, Cardenas sat at his locker reading a Russian novel (“I was on a Tolstoy binge,” he said) when a teammate sneered at him. “What are you reading, the encyclopedia?” he said. Cardenas never read a book in the locker room again.

“I felt like there was a divide I had to make,” he said.

That divide weighed on him as he climbed through the minor leagues. Cardenas was a key piece in a trade with the Oakland Athletics when the Phillies acquired Joe Blanton. By the summer of 2010, he reached Class AAA in Sacramento, but after a rough patch, Oakland demoted him to AA.

A frustrated Cardenas, already thinking about life beyond baseball, told the organization he was leaving the sport. The A’s asked him to take some time and think it over, and his parents cautioned against a rash decision, reminding him of his health care benefits and the other responsibilities that came along with real life.

“We didn’t want him to have any regrets,” Rubio said.

A burning desire to reach the major leagues helped to lead him back, but he also took the first steps toward the pursuit of his next dream. He applied and was accepted to N.Y.U. That fall, Cardenas took a red-eye flight from California to New York to ensure his college enrollment before returning the next day so he did not miss his team’s playoff game.