Every August, something wonderfully old-fashioned happens in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Boys from places most Americans have never visited walk onto a baseball field carrying the names of their towns, states, and countries across their uniforms. Their families sit nervously in the stands, living and dying with every pitch. Coaches crouch beside overwhelmed pitchers and put an arm around their shoulders. Teammates cheer each other on from the dugouts. When someone hits a home run, a collection of 12-year-olds briefly lose their minds. When someone makes the final out of his summer, he sometimes cries. And before the game begins, the boys take off their hats.

There is something almost jarring about the sight. In an age suspicious of customs, there are kids willingly participating in rituals created before their great-grandfathers were born. They stand along the foul line. They remove their caps. They submit themselves to umpires whose decisions they may angrily disagree with. When the game ends, winners and losers meet again at the center of the field. None of this is strictly necessary for playing baseball. Yet without these little rituals, something about the game would seem incomplete and wholly unsatisfying.

Baseball has always understood this. It is a sport in which ritual and gameplay are so wonderfully intertwined that fans hardly notice its peculiarities. The managers and coaches wear the same uniform as the players. Players tip their caps to adoring fans. People instinctively stand during the seventh-inning stretch. While modern major league stadiums may offer a plethora of culinary delights up to and including filet mignon and world-class sushi, the choicest cuts of wagyu and toro kneel before the humble hot dog and box of Cracker Jack.

The Little League World Series preserves baseball customs in an especially striking way because the boys participating in it are still young enough to do so without embarrassment. A 12-year-old shortstop does not roll his eyes when told to line up with his teammates. The pitcher does not require an explanation of why he should shake the hand of the boy who just ended his season. For a few weeks every summer, children from radically different countries and cultures inhabit a common world governed by rules, rituals, obligations, and courtesies that existed before they arrived and will remain after they leave. More importantly, they arrive representing somewhere. That somewhere means a lot to them.

The Little League World Series preserves baseball customs in an especially striking way because the boys participating in it are still young enough to do so without embarrassment.Tweet This

That unique attachment to a place should sound familiar to Catholics. Throughout Church history, the parish was not understood primarily as a religious community that an individual or family selected from a menu of options. It was territorial. It belonged to a place, a neighborhood; and if you lived within that space, it was yours. The people kneeling beside you on Sunday were not necessarily the people you would have chosen.

However, they were your people. There were families and people you liked and families and folks you avoided. There were crying babies, older ladies who arrived 20 minutes early, terrible singers, excellent cooks, irritating personalities, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. You did not assemble the community according to your preferences.

In that sense, the neighborhood baseball diamond and the Catholic parish once taught similar lessons: you belong to something before you have decided what you think about it. Now, we are accustomed to curating and creating our own communities, either through the natural aspects of who we are or through the desires of who we would like to be. Each year, at the end of the summer, boys who did not choose their place, did not pick their teammates, and did not write baseball’s immortal rules come together in Williamsport to play a game whose ritual origins they probably do not know.

Perhaps that is why the Little League World Series feels so wonderfully refreshing. For a few weeks each summer, we watch kids inhabit a world that has not yet been algorithmically reorganized around individual preferences. They inherit and obey rules, wear the name of a community, accept authority and consequences, honor rituals, and discover that belonging requires something of them. The parish asks much the same of Catholics. It reminds us that community is not merely something we construct around ourselves; it is something we receive and to which we owe something in return. The boys take off their hats because that is what you do when something is bigger than yourself.