We Have a Winner

This year's George Will Award for excellence in overheated Opening Day bloviations goes to The Cincinnati Enquirer, for this editorial in today's paper.

As you know, in selecting a winner of the Will Award, the judges look for that special combination of pomposity and maudlin sentimentality that the "Baseball is Life" crowd finds almost irresistible this time of year. I think you'll agree that this year's winner is a worthy recipient of the Will Award. Among its other highlights, the Enquirer piece:

• Uses the word "glorious" in its title;
  

• Quotes both Walt Whitman and Albert Einstein;

• Impressively and unselfconsciously uses nearly every cliche about Opening Day in existence, including this one: "It's about more than baseball. It's about nostalgia and hope, tradition and youth. It brings us together - people of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. For one day, everyone's a kid again, peeking through the slats in the outfield fence."

The editorial also received extra credit for referencing the fact that baseball is played without a clock. This fact, along with tidbits like "it's the only game in which the defense has the ball," looms large in the cosmology of baseball's cognoscenti.

The award honors the bow-tied conservative intellectual George Will, whose efforts to demonstrate his "regular guyness" by writing pretentious columns about baseball culminated in his unreadable best seller "Men at Work," which almost single-handedly created the Tony LaRussa Cult.

Congratulations to The Enquirer.