Baseball plays a cruel trick on those of us who were captured by it before we even had the chance to resist. It takes hold of us, a mystical unrelenting force that someone outside the baseball cult couldn’t possibly understand. From the time of your first game, from the time you can put on a cap, from the time you know what 6-4-3 actually means, it’s got you.

It makes you define seemingly important moments in your non-baseball life by baseball-related events. The first time you kissed a girl—also the night Butch Huskey hit two home runs and actually stole a base. The day you learned your Mom got that big promotion—also the day you saw Mark Clark take a no-hitter into the eighth.

What baseball does is it fools you to believe that you can forever combine reality with fantasy—that everyday life is tied to an outcome of a game.

But then, as much as we all don’t want it to, this dream world fades away. You’re told that there are bigger things than baseball—that baseball is a game that in the “real world” is reserved for a few athletically blessed individuals. You, unfortunately, are not among them. And that’s when your dream dies.

But increasingly, there are those without the physical capability to pursue major league careers who refuse to let that dream go. When they show up at places like Harvard or Yale or Princeton, they don’t appear any different from the rest of us. They could be the aspiring consultant in your Ec class or the doctor-to-be sitting next to you in Orgo. But somewhere beneath the responsibility of adulthood, their fantasy remains their reality.

This is the story of the growing number of Ivy League graduates who, faced with all the expectations of wealth and success that come with the label and the degree, chose to never give up on their dreams. They’re proving that the “real world” does include baseball. And while they’re at it, they’re revolutionizing the game.

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Mike Smith grew up at the crossroads of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. New London, Conn.—nearly equidistant from Yawkey Way and the Major Deegan—forces Red Sox fans and Yankees fans to share neighborhoods and playgrounds.

Smith, who quickly chose red over blue as his preferred color, was no different than any other baseball-crazed kid. He liked playing with his friends during the day, and loved watching his heroes on television at night.

And then, after high school, Smith moved 50 miles west along the Connecticut coast to Yale, where he would study geology and geophysics with hopes of becoming a weatherman. Baseball began to drift away.

Dan Noffsinger ’03 seemed similarly fated to distance himself from the game he loved as a kid. Coming into Harvard in 1999, Noffsinger was a fantasy baseball aficionado with Little League experience and not much else. He found his niche on campus as an applied math and economics concentrator and with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra.

Then there’s Mike Hill ’93. Hill sustained his dream of becoming a major league player for much longer than either Smith or Noffsinger. Hill stood out in both football and baseball for the Crimson. Following graduation in 1993, he was drafted in the 31st round by the Texas Rangers and set out intent on pursuing what he hoped would be a “career path to be a Hall of Fame player.”

Somewhere along the line, the disparate backgrounds of Smith, Noffsinger, and Hill converged to produce three men determined to break into and make a career in the game they couldn’t escape.

Smith, now Director of Baseball Operations for the Detroit Tigers, Noffsinger, now a Baseball Operations Assistant with the Florida Marlins, and Hill, now Noffsinger’s superior as Vice President and Assistant General Manager of the Marlins, are just three of the many recent Ivy graduates who are helping to redefine the way baseball front offices are run.

The surge of former Ivy Leaguers making their way into baseball operations first came to the forefront in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book “Moneyball.” Lewis followed the inner workings of the Oakland Athletics front office, making specific reference to Paul DePodesta ’95, a Harvard graduate who served as Assistant General Manager to Billy Beane in Oakland at the time and has since moved on to become General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.