For a lot of people, 21-year-old Daniel Norris is living the dream. Several dreams, actually. He’s a top MLB prospect who received a $2 million signing bonus from the Toronto Blue Jays, and, despite that millionaire status, he lives in a $10,000 Volkswagen van behind a Walmart in Florida. So he’s living the baseball dream kids grow up imagining and the eccentric millionaire dream that I long for every day. The man is a hero.
Norris doesn’t live in his van because of poor life choices or wasted millions. He just wants to live in his van.
This is where Norris has chosen to live while he tries to win a job in the Blue Jays’ rotation: in a broken-down van parked under the blue fluorescent lights of a Wal-Mart in the Florida suburbs. There, every morning, is one of baseball’s top-ranked prospects, doing pull-ups and resistance exercises on abandoned grocery carts. There he is each evening, making French press coffee and organic stir-fry on his portable stove. There he is at night, wearing a spelunking headlamp to go with his unkempt beard, writing in his “thought journal” or rereading Kerouac.
This is how this man, dubbed “the future of the Toronto Blue Jays” by ESPN and who has a 92 mph fastball and a deal with Nike, chooses to “escape the pressures” that await him as a major-league fixture. It’s also just one of the myriad “unconventional” facets to Norris, who took an offseason job at an outdoor store in Tennessee and shaves his beard with an ax, like fascinating combination of Nick Offerman and Matthew McConaughey.
Thank you, Van Dan, for being the delightfully strange presence we need in baseball and beyond.
Source: ESPN
