More Journeyman

I’m sitting watching tonight’s episode of Journeyman, which I wrote about a few months ago. I’m impressed with it so far, after 8 episodes: It’s consistent and intriguing, and the story seems to be moving right along.

One unexpected bonus is that NBC has been so completely off-base in promoting most episodes: It seems like they often promote elements of the show which are sensational but pretty minor. For example, a few weeks ago the previews played up the fact that our hero, Dan Vassar, was out with his son Zack at a farmer’s market when he disappears into the past, leaving Zack alone in a crowd of strangers. Sure, it’s good copy (as they say), but it had almost nothing to do with the crux of the episode. This means that I’m usually surprised – and pleasantly so – by what really happens in the episode.

The series’ story arc is pretty nifty, too: Dan’s time-travelling ex-girlfriend Livia is gradually revealing her background and Dan’s disappearances are slowly catching up to him in the present. And there are lots of little hints that one other character might know what’s going on. The acting is also strong, especially Dan and Jack. It’s a nicely-blended mix of character drama (the Dan-Katie-Jack triangle is intense) and plot (each episode is self-contained, but the overall storyline is moving forward).

I’m usually very skeptical that a TV series has a plan and direction – almost every one I’ve ever seen is obviously plotted on-the-fly, and this becomes painfully evident after a couple of years. (I gave up on The X-Files early in the third season when this became clear for that series.) But Journeyman certainly feels like it’s got a plan behind it. And even if the direction is somewhat loose, the theme of self-determination in the face of what seems like an overwhelming cosmic force might be able to carry it for quite a while.

I’ll be pretty bummed if the series gets cancelled, or if the Hollywood writer’s strike blows the series off-course, although in principle I support the writers in their walkout. But hopefully the series will have a decent run with a satisfying conclusion. It’s got me pretty well hooked so far.

Three Times in Six Days

I’m in the middle of a run of 3 sessions of ultimate frisbee in 6 days: Our regular games on this past Thursday night and next Tuesday night, and a tournament today.

It rained pretty steadily last night, so I was surprised that the tourney today was on, but the field drained really well and only had a few patches of mud. It was overcast with patches of sun, some wind, and a cool temperature, which is just about ideal for frisbee. So we drove over about 9:20 this morning, Debbi coming out to watch me play as she often does.

The league has 9 teams, but we usually condense down to 6 teams for the tournaments, so our team combined with another team for today. The league this year has a “Snow White and the 9 Dwarves” theme, and our teams were named Forcey (mine) and Heckle, and of course the most important part of a tournament is to come up with a team name. “Forkle” won out over “Feckle”, “Horsey” and “Horkle”, so we got that one nailed.

I had a pretty good game: The first point I correctly read the player I was covering as wanting to take off down the line for a medium-distance score, and managed to make two blocks in the point. I made a couple of other blocks during the day, which is unusual for me since I don’t usually position myself well for blocks. I caught a couple of scores and forced a couple of other turnovers. My endurance has been holding up surprisingly well this year – probably all the bicycling I’ve been doing in the late summer – so I was able to keep running for quite a while. I finally ran out of gas at the end of the second game and called it a day (I know I’m done when I tell my feet to run and they don’t do anything). Happily, it was a successful morning as Forkle won both games I played. Hopefully they managed to win the third one, too.

We have a really fun regular team this year, with a mix of skills and also a mix of heights (our team last year was a little frustrating since I was the tallest person on it, which meant I was almost always matched up against someone taller than me). We’ve generally been successful, too, and everyone has a good attitude. So it’s been a lot of fun.

We came home and ran a few errands and then collapsed on the couch to watch football until I have to leave for my book discussion group, which is later this evening. I’m gonna be stiff and sore tomorrow morning, but the real question is whether I’ll be able to play frisbee again on Tuesday after only one day off!

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 7 November 2007.

  • Countdown to Final Crisis #25 of 52 (backwards) by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Keith Giffen, Ron Lim, Jimmy Palmiotti & John Stanisci (DC)
  • Metal Men #4 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
  • Annihilation Conquest: Starlord #4 of 4, by Keith Giffen, Timothy Green II & Victor Olazaba (Marvel)
  • Annihilation: Conquest #1 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
  • Fantastic Four #551, by Dwayne McDuffie, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
  • Hellboy: Darkness Calls #6 of 6, by Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegredo (Dark Horse)
  • Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #3 of 5, by Mike Mignola & Jason Armstrong (Dark Horse)
  • The Perhapanauts: Second Chances TPB vol 2, by Todd Dezago & Craig Rousseau (Dark Horse)
  • Boneyard TPB vol 6, by Richard Moore (NBM)
Countdown to Final Crisis #25 Countdown to Final Crisis this week features the pencils of Ron Lim. I remember when Lim fist turned up 20 years ago pencilling the sorta-kinda-parody comic Ex-Mutants. Since then he’s had a long career with an art style reminiscent of George Pérez and Dan Jurgens, although without either of their senses of form or attention to detail. I guess he’s been kicking around for a while drawing books I don’t read, but it’s interesting that he’s one of the guys DC’s hauling in to contribute to Countdown, since I wouldn’t call him an A-list artist. His artwork here is serviceable, but it felt like a rush job.
  Annihilation: Conquest picks up where the three mini-series (plus the Nova tie-in) ended. Quasar and Adam Warlock are obviously going to be the protagonists here, with Starlord, the Super-Skrull, Wraith and Ronan in supporting roles. I think it’ll be fun, and Tom Raney’s artwork is pretty good. The reveal of the villain at the end is a bit of a letdown – few characters have been quite as overused in a cliché manner as this one – but you can’t have everything.

Of the mini-series, the Quasar and Wraith ones were the best. Starlord was pretty good – with very good artwork – but didn’t really go anywhere. The Nova tie-in was entirely superfluous, as I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I’ve been reading the original Annihilation series as the trade paperbacks come out, and it’s much better than Conquest. But they’re certainly trying really hard in this follow-up.

Fantastic Four #551 I’m a sucker for this sort of thing: Fantastic Four is kicking off a new story titled “Epilogue”, whose first chapter is “The Beginning of the End”, in which Doctor Doom and two other characters come back from 75 years in the future to warn the FF that Reed is about to make an error which is going to have grave consequences for the future. It ends with a sudden shock and a cliffhanger. It also fortunately completely ignores the after-effects of the Civil War, thank goodness, although I suppose the story might be intended to explain some things about the Civil War. I dunno – I’m just as happy to forget all about it.

I’m not at all familiar with Dwayne McDuffie’s work, but this is a promising start, with a neat revelation about how Reed works when he’s on his own. Paul Pelletier’s pencils reminds me a little of Paul Ryan, although his approach to faces is weirdly fluid and results in some odd, unsettling effects (Sue often looks like she’s had some unfortunate plastic surgery).

It seems like the problem with the FF these days is that they’re not treated as much of a family, and that Reed always seems to be very distant and too analytical, which not only is No Fun but undercuts the theme of the series: Four adventurers against all the evil in the world. Reed still comes across as too analytical here, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Perhapanauts vol 2: Second Chances The second volume of Perhapanauts picks up where the first one left off, and it’s more of the same. There’s a nifty time travel angle in the first story, and a different (but more mundane) time travel angle in the second story, which has a bittersweet ending. There are some loose ends, which is frustrating, although not as much so in the first volume. While the book is rather fun, it feels too light for me to commit to following it when it kicks off a regular series sometime next year. I just don’t feel hooked by the characters or the scenario, a problem I also had with Noble Causes a while back, which is a book with a similar feel and which has received similar acclaim. Maybe just chalk it up to “not my cup of tea”.

November Already?

I’m still quite busy, both at home and at work. So much so that I now have three books with partially-written reviews that I need to finish and post here. It seems like as I get older, I have ever-more stretches of time when I’m so busy I start falling behind on the “everyday stuff”.

This past weekend was quite busy. We slept a lot, since we were both feeling quite tired from the week; we were glad for the extra hour of sleep!

Saturday morning we got together with Subrata and Susan for lunch at The Counter, which they’d never been to. Debbi and Susan then went off shopping at a sale while Subrata and I came home and played some Magic (Ravnica sealed deck), which was fun although neither of us had terribly exciting decks. (I think draft tends to lead to building more interesting decks than sealed, but then you can do sealed with any number of players, so they each have their uses.) I’d contemplated going up to Borderlands Books for their 10-year anniversary sale, but Subrata decided to pass and I decided I didn’t have much I was really looking for and didn’t feel like making the drive up to San Francisco. Instead we stayed home and did some chores and ran some errands, and then went to Cafe Borrone for dinner and reading.

Sunday we ran a few short errands, but mostly stayed home to have a day off. We watched what Subrata called Football Armageddon, otherwise known as the Patriots-Colts game, which was a rare exciting Pats game, in that they still won but it wasn’t easy for a change.

The weekend ended with a bit of irony: Sunday evening I was feeling all happy that I’d finished everything on my list to do for the weekend… and then around 6 pm my stereo receiver stopped working, just emitting a hum instead of any actual sound. I tinkered with it a little, but it seemed pretty dead. I’d been planning to replace it anyway (it’s 18 years old!), but I hadn’t expected it to force the issue. Ah, well.

(Strangely, it started working again by last night, and it’s on right now playing KCSM jazz music, but I bet it won’t last.)

Anyway, November is here: It’s gotten cold and dark out, now that the time has changed. We’re supposed to get rain later this week. My seasonal affective disorder has been keeping itself in check pretty well this fall, and now I’m actively looking forward to the rain. I just wish the trees would finish dropping their leaves so I can clean up the back yard.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 31 October 2007.

  • Action Comics #858, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
  • Countdown to Final Crisis #26 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Keith Giffen & Scott Kolins (DC)
  • Countdown to Adventure #3 of 8, by Adam Beechen, Eddy Barrows & Julio Ferreira, and Justin Gray & Fabrizio Fiorentino (DC)
  • Countdown to Mystery #2 of 8, by Steve Gerber, Justiniano & Walden Wong, and Matthew Sturges & Steven Jorge Segovia (DC)
  • The Death of the New Gods #2 of 8, by Jim Starlin & Matt Banning (DC)
  • Justice Society of America #10, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham, Ruy José & Drew Geraci (DC)
  • Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #35, by Tony Bedard & Dennis Calero (DC)
  • Annihilation: Book Two TPB, by Keith Giffen & Renato Arlen, Javier Grillo-Marxuach & Gregory Titus, and Simon Furman & Jorge Lucas (Marvel)
  • Annihilation Conquest: Quasar #4 of 4, by Christos N. Gage, Mike Lilly & Bob Almond (Marvel)
  • Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 by David Petersen (Archaia)
  • The Secret History Book Three: The Grail of Montségur by Jean-Pierre Pécau, Goran Sedzuka & Geto (Archaia)
  • The Secret History Book Four: The Keys of Saint Peter by Jean-Pierre Pécau & Leo Pilipovic (Archaia)
  • The Perhapanauts: First Blood TPB, by Todd Dezago & Craig Rousseau (Dark Horse)
Action Comics #858 Action Comics is continuing the latest weirdness at DC Comics: The “return” of the “original” Legion of Super-Heroes, as prefaced in the awful “Lightning Saga” in JLA and JSA earlier this year. This issue kicks of “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes”, in which Brainiac 5 sends an automated time bubble back to the 20th century to recruit superman to help with some disaster in 3008. He also fixes Superman’s memory so he remembers the Legion (without explaining why Superman remembered them perfectly clearly in the Lightning Saga), triggering a reminiscence of Supes being recruited into the Legion as a boy. He’s then catapulted forward where he finds that things are in bad shape indeed, and that the rest of the Legion had a really good reason to not want Superman brought into the fray.

I’m not a real big fan of either Geoff Johns or Gary Frank. In Johns’ case, I find his characterizations bland and his stories so even-keeled that one hardly notices when they pass their climactic moment. In Frank’s case, I think it’s mostly his association with the tedious and dull Supreme Power series over at Marvel, and that’s not really his fault. His designs and rendering are actually quite strong, although I wish his characters weren’t so… toothy. Reservations aside, this issue is a fine example of hooking your readers and drawing them in: Why did the Legion vanish from Superman’s life when he became an adult? Why did they contact him now? And how’s he going to get out of this one? The success or failure of this story will primarily rest on answering those questions.

All of this completely shoves aside he question of how this Legion reconciles with the other in-continuity Legions which have been around for the last 15 years, which have all be in-continuity, too. My bet is that most or all of them have been from the futures of parallel Earths, now that we have them back thanks to Infinite Crisis. Which is not a very satisfying answer, but DC’s continuity isn’t exactly about satisfaction these days.

Rachelle has some nice scans of this issue, although she also spoils the cliffhanger at the end, so view at your own risk.

Anyway, if this sounds at all interesting, I would in fact recommend it. The art is nice, Johns does a fine job of recapping who the Legion are and why they’re important without going into the nitty-gritty details that casual readers won’t care about, and like I said it ends on a compelling cliffhanger. Maybe this story will be Johns art his best>?

Countdown to Mystery #2 Three Countdown books this week. Countdown itself has been renamed Countdown to Final Crisis, and the story is mainly a recap of what’s going on. Since the answer is basically “nothing much” you can draw your own conclusions. (There’s some reason to believe that Final Crisis will reboot the DC Universe again. While Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted things while DC was at its creative apex, a reboot now feels like editorial admitting that things are so screwed up that it’s not salvageable. Which ironically is exactly the opposite message delivered by Infinite Crisis. But nothing DC does these days can really surprise me – I’m that cynical about it.)

Countdown to Adventure is the best of the three, a little on the grim side to my tastes, but at least it’s exciting and the heroes (Adam Strange, Starfire and Animal Man) are likable. The backup story with Forerunner is vaguely interesting since she’s visiting a new parallel Earth, but the use of Dark Angel as the villain is a big snooze.

Countdown to Mystery is somewhere in-between. Steve Gerber’s Doctor Fate is not without interest, although it’s slow and feels like he’s trying to impose some structure onto Fate’s magic, which always seems like it’s just a bad idea when it comes to magic in fiction. So I’m on the fence about it, but it could turn out to be good. The backup story involving Eclipso, however, is just vile: Eclipso corrupts Plastic Man and then sets her sights on the Creeper. It’s borderline-unreadable. Yuck.

Justice Society of America #10 Geoff Johns is a busy guy – I may not be his biggest fan, but I sure can’t complain about his work ethic. After last issue’s prologue, this issue launches full-on into “Thy Kingdom Come”, in which the Kingdom Come Superman from Earth-22 is pulled into Earth-1. He resembles Power Girl’s late cousin, leaving her confused and disappointed, and Starman knows him, having been to Earth-22 for the events of Kingdom Come. This Superman is pretty messed up, having seen a lot of death and destruction on his world, much of it due directly or indirectly to him, and he feels responsible even for that which he wasn’t responsible for. This could play out any of several different ways, and I hope Johns surprises us rather than ending the story with a silly “Superman on a rampage” fight.

The real potential of this story is that it could make the JSA matter again. The JSA has felt for a long time like a team whose time is long since past, and the array of bland writers and artists who have been helming the book for the last ten years haven’t helped. Just because the team has multiple generations of heroes doesn’t mean it’s anything more than a generic superhero book. (Contrast with the 1970s revival of All-Star Comics, which is the finest example of multigenerational superheroes I’ve yet seen.) It would only take a little adventurousness to give this JSA series some depth and feeling, and the KC Superman could give it that.

Incidentally, I’ve given penciller Dale Eaglesham the short shrift when talking about this series: His simple linework is winning me over: His facial expressions are getting stronger with every issue, and unlike many artists he draws full backgrounds, making it feel like his characters are inhabiting a fully-realized world. This issue opens with a full-page panel with Power Girl, Cyclone and Ma Hunkel, and Cyclone’s expression is just perfect. It’s followed by a double-page spread with Superman and the original JSAers in their meeting room, and it’s equally powerful. Later on, there’s another nearly-full-page panel of Superman’s first public appearance, and while the focus is entirely on Superman, the backgrounds are fully-rendered and the composition is great. While Eaglesham’s style isn’t entirely to my taste, I definitely have to applaud him for putting so much effort and detail into his work, without compromising basic storytelling. Honestly it seems like there aren’t a lot of artists around today who can do all that.

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 #2 Archaia Studios Press has been bunching up their releases lately, with two issues of another series I don’t read coming out last week, and two issues of The Secret History this week. I suspect ASP is growing a little faster than it can keep up with, so some stuff is getting delayed due to lack of manpower or capital. That’s just my guess, though. I’m pretty forgiving of small presses and their delays, although I am an unusually committed comics reader. Surely a regular schedule would serve the company’s cash flow better, though.

I’m mostly enjoying The Secret History, although it delves too far into historical details I’m entirely unfamiliar with. The general storyline is okay (four powerful individuals influencing world events from prehistory through today) and the art is excellent (even with a different artist each issue), so I’m willing to follow it through its 7-issue run. I just wish it were more accessible.

David Petersen keeps a perfectly regular schedule with Mouse Guard, and the second issue of the new series came out right on time, so he’s bucked the trend there.. The series has been a surprise hit and has gotten lots of critical acclaim. I enjoy it myself, and can certainly recommend it as well-drawn entertainment, albeit maybe not for preteens since the violence does get a little rough sometimes.

The Perhapanauts vol 1: First Blood The Perhapanauts resembles Mike Mignola’s B.P.R.D. in that it’s a team of operatives who investigate paranormal phenomena and deal with them if necessary. This team is a little more out there than B.P.R.D., with Bigfoot and El Chupacabras as team members, along with a telepath, a ghost, and a mysterious guy whose background is kept secret. They can time travel and dimension hop with minimal difficulty, although they also face some pretty rough opposition as a result.

Nonetheless, the series feels a lot like Mignola’s work, which isn’t bad, but being “B.P.R.D. lite” isn’t a real strong recommendation. Moreover, this first volume ends on a cliffhanger, which is a pretty lousy way to treat new readers. Johanna Draper Carlson likes the series more than I do, I just thought it was pretty lightweight.

Bittersweet Halloween

Every year we buy candy and put out some candles in red-colored holders for Halloween. Traditionally we get hardly any kids, which bums Debbi out because she loves seeing little kids in costume. We don’t get many because we’re on the edge of Apartment Central, on the wrong side of a major street from the rest of the residential area.

This year, though, we hit the motherlode, and went through most of our candy. Many groups of young kids were coming by as late as 7:30. I think it’s because Daylight Savings Time got moved back a week, so the sun didn’t set until 6:30. So it made Debbi’s day.

Unfortunately, I went upstairs to go to the bathroom, and happened to wander into the front room in time to see a trio of teenagers making off with two of my candleholders. I ran downstairs and put on my sandals and ran after them, but by the time I got there there were no candles in sight, and they didn’t know anything about it. So either I caught up to the wrong kids, or they got rid of them (or stashed them in their bags) and played dumb. My bet is the latter, but there’s no way to be sure. I looked around briefly with a flashlight to see if they threw them aside, but no luck.

I’ve always been aware that Halloween is also a night of teenagers (and some adults) playing pranks and generally misbehaving (a friend of mine and I nearly got mugged 20 years ago walking out on Halloween night, and I’ve also been hit with an egg once), so I knew there was a chance I’d lose the candles someday. Honestly, after 5 years I’m surprised this is the first time. But it’s still a bummer that people act this way. Oh well.

We also had a couple of men in a truck loitering around. They parked down the street, drove away, then came back and walked around. Debbi and I each talked to them, and it sounds like they were looking for an apartment complex, and had a number and a complex name, but not the street name. The number suggested that they wanted to be looking on the cross street (our street’s numbers don’t go up that high), so I directed them that way. I’ll never know whether I actually helped them, though. But hopefully they were just lost and that I helped them find their destination.

I don’t have many good memories of Halloween, but I like the idea enough that I keep trying.

Earthquake Time

Tonight we had a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in east San Jose. It was felt throughout the valley, although not by me, since I was running around on a frisbee field at the time.

Debbi says it spooked the cats quite a bit, and herself a little too. Subrata‘s wife Susan says a few things fell off at their house.

Fortunately there seems to have been only minor damage from the strongest Bay Area quake since 1989. Cell phone voice service was out for us for a while, but data still worked, so I sent Debbi and Susan text messages that we were fine. I bet some hidden damage will be found over the next few days, but it looks like we got away with one this time.

Anyway, if you were wondering, we’re okay here.

Just Ignore the Author Behind the Curtain

J.K. Rowling says that Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series is gay.

I hate it when an author makes statements like this about their story after the fact, and I’ve learned through experience to simply ignore them, unless I happen to be specifically interested in the author’s writing process (which, in the case of Harry Potter, I’m not). My feeling is that if a fact didn’t matter enough to actually make it into the book, then it ain’t so. That doesn’t mean that it ain’t not so, either. But once the story is finished and distributed, the author doesn’t get to fiat it into existence.

(In Rowling’s case, I also wonder why she bothers to bring it up now. Cynically, I suspect it’s just to keep her name in the news, now that Harry Potter Mania is fading.)

John Scalzi weighs in on the subject:

Do these facts mean that Dumbledore’s sexuality is unimportant to who the character is? Absolutely not. The moment Rowling said (or discovered, however you want to put it) that Dumbledore was gay, it made a difference in how she perceived him and how she wrote him. The only way Rowling’s statement of Dumbledore’s sexuality would be irrelevant or should be ignored by the reader (should they hear of the fact at all) is if there were proof that Rowling was tacking on the sexuality of Dumbledore after the fact of the writing, i.e., that Rowling had no conception of Dumbledore’s sexuality through all the books, and then is throwing the “dude, he’s gay” statement out there now just for kicks.

I’m in agreement with John on many things, but I think he’s got this one exactly wrong. I think his error is in confusing the story with the author; while the two are clearly linked, they’re not the same thing. Once the author has finished the story, it becomes a thing unto itself, experienced completely independently of further input from the author. In effect, once the story is finished, the author becomes just another reader of the story, her opinion no more important than that of any other reader for the purposes of interpreting and experiencing the story. Anything she left out of the story is not part of the story, even if it factored into how she wrote it. If it was left out, and it can’t be reasonably deduced from the text, then it’s not part of the story, and in this case, not part of the character.

Essentially (and I know I’m not the first one to say this), once the story is finished, it’s no longer the author’s story, it’s the reader’s story. I mean this in the experiential sense, not the legal sense, of course: The reader doesn’t own the story, but they do own their experience of reading the story, and their interpretation of the story, and I think it’s entirely fair to base that entirely on the story, and completely disregard elements which are not in the text.

I think part of the point of fiction is that it’s an experiential and interpretive thing. Having the author come down from on high and state “this is so” when it’s not even in the story undermines that part of the experience, and cuts out the possibility of interpretation.

John also says:

Going back to Rothstein, the best you can say for his argument is that it notes that Dumbledore doesn’t have to be gay for many of the influential events of his life to have had an effect on him. To which the correct response is to say, yes, well. And this would be different from the lives of actual gay people exactly how? We go through any number of events in our lives without our sexuality front and center — it would make sense an author would model a character similarly. But it doesn’t mean that at the end of the day that sexuality doesn’t matter to who the character is.

The crux of the issue is this: If you can’t perceive that the character is gay, then does it matter to you whether the character is gay? John thinks so, I don’t. It’s a matter of perception, because reading fiction is entirely a matter of perception. But once a story is finished, that something else went on behind the scenes, that the writer intended something which didn’t come through in the story, means that those elements actually don’t matter. Because if they did matter, then they’d be present in the story.

Which means that I’ll believe John Perry is allergic to blueberries when it shows up in one of Scalzi’s novels, and not before.

I don’t really care whether or not Dumbledore was gay, but having read the books, I see no strong reason to believe one way or the other. Unlike Ceej, who has some smart things to say about the whole brouhaha, I don’t think the Grindelwald stuff is compelling evidence.

Your mileage may vary, but the important thing is that it’s your mileage, not J.K. Rowling’s.

The Red Sox’ Coming Out Party

The really fun thing about the World Series for me was watching the Red Sox’ young players have their own “coming out party”. While the veterans on the club (Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, and World Series MVP Mike Lowell) all had fine series, the younger players were equally impressive:

  • Jacoby Ellsbury (CF, rookie, age 23) went from playing in AA to hitting 438/500/688 in the World Series, with 4 doubles and a stolen base. It would be a stretch to say that he won Game 3 all by himself, but he was certainly the highlight of the game.
  • Dustin Pedroia (2B, rookie, age 23) hit 278/350/500 with a double and a home run. The potential 2007 Rookie of the Year was even better in the ALCS.
  • Kevin Youkilis (1B, age 28) actually was a rookie back in 2004, but didn’t play in the 2004 World Series. He only batted 222/417/444 in the World Series and missed out on most of the games in Colorado because of the lack of a DH, but he was a total monster in the ALCS, batting 500/576/929 (!) with 3 (!!!) home runs. He also went the whole 2007 regular season without committing an error (and then committed 3 in the playoffs). He’ll probably never be a star, but he’s put to rest speculation that the “Greek God of Walks” wouldn’t be very valuable because of a lack of power. He might have a better career than John Kruk did, even if he is already 28.
  • Jon Lester (SP, age 23) came all the way back from chemotherapy for cancer to pitch 5.2 shutout innings and become the winning pitcher in the series clincher. He’ll likely be the Red Sox’ 4th or 5th starter next year, assuming either or both of Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield head elsewhere.
  • Jonathan Papelbon (RP, age 26) didn’t allow a run in the Series and saved 3 games.
  • Daisuke Matsuzaka (SP, rookie, age 26) isn’t a true rookie, as he was a big free agent pickup from Japan last off-season, but he was nearly the Sox’ “forgotten star” as he faded down the stretch, possibly because he threw more innings in 2007 than he ever had in Japan and just got tired. But he picked up his game in the ALCS and World Series, throwing two good games and getting a key base hit in Game 3 of the World Series. Japanese players often seem to do better in their second year in the Majors, so I fully expect Matsuzaka will be better next year than he was this year. Other than fatigue, I think there’s nothing to worry about here.

I love seeing young players do well, and it’s additionally encouraging that the Sox have a solid core of young players to build around for the next 2-3 years (if not longer). This doesn’t even count other “under-30-somethings” on the roster, like Beckett, Clay Buchholz, and Manny Delcarmen.

The Red Sox’ future is already here, and it just won a World Series.