Daily Inspiration Quote by George Will

Calling baseball "only a game" is the kind of tidy dismissal that sounds sophisticated until you notice it’s really just a refusal to pay attention. George Will’s line skewers that pose with a sly, lawyerly move: yes, baseball is a game in the same way the Grand Canyon is a hole. Technically correct, culturally idiotic. The joke works because it exposes how certain words - "only", "just" - aren’t descriptive so much as disciplinary. They shrink whole worlds to a manageable size, letting the speaker signal superiority over people who care.

Will, a journalist steeped in American civic mythology and comfortable treating sports as a branch of national character, is defending fandom without sounding sentimental. The Grand Canyon analogy is doing heavy rhetorical lifting: it drags baseball out of the entertainment bin and parks it beside a shared monument, something people feel entitled to revere. Once you accept that, the punchline lands: "Not all holes, or games, are created equal". It echoes the cadence of the Declaration of Independence, borrowing the nation’s most sanctified phrase to argue - half-seriously, half-impishly - that hierarchies of meaning are unavoidable.

The subtext is a cultural critique: America loves to sneer at devotion (to sports, art, ritual) while quietly living off the cohesion those devotions create. Will isn’t claiming baseball is sacred by nature; he’s saying significance is earned by history, communal memory, and the strange fact that millions agree to care at the same time.