When he's standing on the field, wind is often the only thing that Jalen Harris can hear.
Noise slams into him like a brick wall so that the shouts of his coach, the cheers from the crowd and the crack of the bat get lost beneath the whoosh of a steady gust.
The 17-year-old baseball prodigy, who was born deaf and hears through a cochlear implant, tracks the ball with his eyes and relies almost entirely on his vision to follow the game.
It's a system that works well - scouts from major American colleges and multiple major-league teams came to watch Jalen play last week in Orlando, where he stood out amid the country's best at the second of four tryout camps for Canada's junior national baseball team.
"To be honest with you, I've never had a player like him before," said Damien Blen, a former coach of the Cuban national baseball team who has been grooming Jalen's game for five years.
"He knows that he needs an extra effort to reach certain balls, he focuses a little bit more. I think he's always pushed himself a little bit further and that's made him the way he is."
In an interview this week at his high school, Jalen said: "It's pretty easy, if you were born deaf, to just focus on the ball."
His teachers, coaches and friends say this is typical modesty from a kid on track to becoming the nicest guy in Major League Baseball. Or maybe the nicest guy on a sports scholarship to a major U.S. university - Jalen hasn't decided yet, partly because he's too humble to make any assumptions.
Between baseball camps, Jalen is a Grade 11 student in the deaf and hard of hearing program at Northern Secondary School, near Eglinton Avenue East and Mount Pleasant Road.
It's a place where deaf students are regulars on the football team's defensive line, and where the deaf and hard of hearing ball hockey team is provincial champion.
Playing on sports teams with their hearing classmates "gives them confidence, it gives them a sense of belonging," said Deb Matthews, an interpreter with Northern's deaf and hard of hearing program, who coached Jalen on the ball hockey team.
"We don't know the half of what these kids have to go through because of their deafness."
Nearly 15 years ago, Jalen was one of North America's youngest recipients of a cochlear implant. Doctors surgically inserted an electrode that could stimulate the auditory nerve between his brain and his ear.
"The first sound that Jalen heard was crumpling paper," his father, Terry Harris, recalled of the day doctors activated the electrode in his son's head. "We took a piece of paper, put it by his ear and crumpled it up, which scared the crap out of him. He hid under the table and he peed himself."
Mr. Harris and his wife, Sandra, decided early in Jalen's life that they wouldn't treat their deaf son any differently than they did his hearing brother, Jesse, which meant that the boys spent their childhood on the playing field, the court or the ice.
They were raised on stories about their grandparents, three generations after the family came to Canada on the Underground Railroad, gathering around the radio to hear Jackie Robinson step up to the plate and through the race barrier.
On his club team, Jalen wears Jackie's number, 42. Off the field, he share's Jackie's intellect and quiet confidence. He moves as though he has been 6 foot 2 and 210 pounds all his life.
Until recently Jalen contemplated a career in professional hockey rather than baseball, but the high risk of head injuries presented an especially steep gamble for someone who relies on an embedded electrode to hear.
None of his coaches, teachers or family can finger what makes him such a stellar athlete, but in various terms they describe an acute awareness and an innate maturity that lend Jalen an instinct for any game.
"He is just able to concentrate and focus more than the other kids are," said Sinead Whelehan, Jalen's English teacher in the deaf and hard of hearing program.
In Ms. Whelehan's class, he's among deaf classmates; in other classes, he has the help of a sign language and lip reading interpreter. In the hallways, he can drown out the din with Bob Marley on his iPod, and most of his classmates know that fidgeting with their desks or clicking their pens can block out his ability to hear the teacher.
But there are no accommodations on the baseball field. There, Jalen's not a deaf athlete, or a lip-reader or a kid with a cochlear implant - he's the team's third baseman.
"Sports have helped not to think about the fact that I'm deaf and what I should do," he said. "It just happens that I play sports and I'm deaf."