To Read: Adrian Cardenas, for The New Yorker, on Why He Quit

The image embedded here, stolen from a New Yorker piece by the now-retired Adrian Cardenas, depicts the former Phillies and then A’s and then Cubs prospect breaking up an A.J. Burnett no-hitter last season (i.e. 2012).

Also stolen from that same piece is the following paragraph (although one will note that the other paragraphs around it are also worthy of some consideration):

I quit after trying to balance my life as a professional baseball player with my life as a student during the last three years of my career. In the spring and summer, I played ball. In the fall, I studied creative writing and philosophy at New York University. But with every semester that passed, I loved school more than I loved baseball, and eventually I knew I had to choose one over the other. As I submerged myself into an academic environment, I thought often of my parents, who knew nothing about baseball but raised me with a passion for music and language so great that sports seemed irrelevant by comparison.

Article brought to author’s attention by pretty virile-seeming older gentleman Don Hammack.