Now he pulls out of Wal-Mart and drives three miles through Dunedin, squeezing the VW into a parking spot among his teammates' luxury sports cars and tinted SUVs. He sits in the back of the van to heat water for coffee. A few Blue Jays stop by on their way into the facility and watch Norris fiddle with his stove. The pilot light doesn't seem to be working. The water is still cold. "Why don't you just, like, go get something normal to eat," says another young pitcher, Marcus Stroman, reminding Norris that the team provides free coffee inside. "Don't you think this is kind of crazy?"

"Not to me," Norris says. "To me this is the way that makes sense."

Before the Blue Jays understood his convictions, Norris felt like the team had trouble making sense of his unpredictable life -- coaches, teammates and executives asking him questions that indicated a measure of unease. Why, with seven figures in the bank, did he take an offseason job working 40 hours a week at an outdoor outfitter in his hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee? Would it do permanent damage to his back muscles to spend his first minor league season sharing an apartment with two teammates in Florida and sleeping only in a hammock? Why had he decided to spend his first offseason vacationing not on a Caribbean cruise with teammates or partying in South Beach but instead alone in the hostels of Nicaragua, renting a motorcycle for $2 a day, hiking into the jungle, surfing among the stingrays? And was that really a picture on Twitter of the Blue Jays' best prospect, out again in the woods, shaving his tangled beard with the blade of an ax?