Monday, April 02, 2007

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"In our sun-down perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing Base, a certain game of Ball. Let us go forth a while a breathe better air into our lungs ... the game of Ball is glorious."

--Walt Whitman

I'd like to thank the Academy, and Ken Burns, for attempting to turn an entire generation of baseball fans into Whitman-quoting pussies.

I'd also like to thank George Will for turning the entire process of reading a baseball column into something about as enjoyable as being audited by the IRS ... while receiving a digital prostate exam.

Hornless Rhino said...

Amen, brother.