PHOENIX — It was the offseason, and Zach Reks didn’t have much money, but he had time. At a gym in his hometown of Chicago, the Dodgers outfield prospect met a man who offered to buy him a round-trip flight to Hawaii if he tended to a coffee plantation. He’d work three or four hours a day. He’d earn $15 an hour. The rest of his days would be free.



Reks accepted the proposition. Why not? But as he boarded a westbound jet at O’Hare International Airport, he feared the worst. What would he be getting into? He calmed himself down by embracing the abject uncertainty.



“Sometimes,” he said, “you gotta live in the unknown.”



Reks, 26, landed to find a pristine 1,700-tree estate waiting for him on on the Hualālai volcano’s western slopes, within the Kona district of the Big Island. He met the man who owned it, Phil Hodson, a Chicago insurance specialist. He slept in Hodson’s guest house. After some...