A Few Hundred Twelve-Year-Olds Are Showing Us How It's Done

Inside the village at the Little League World Series, where twenty countries live as neighbors. This is the America I know.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news?

Back in June, I wrote about Lawrence, Kansas, the college town that adopted Algeria’s World Cup team as its own. A lot of you told me that story felt like the America you know. Even as we hear, day after day, that foreigners are supposed to be a threat.

Some people may think Lawrence was an exception. That deep down, fearing the outsider is just our nature. But this week, another tournament is underway, and a few hundred twelve-year-olds are proving otherwise.

On Wednesday, the Little League World Series returned to Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Twenty teams, ten from across America and ten from everywhere else. South Korea and Texas. Japan and Iowa. Mexico, Australia, Curaçao, Massachusetts. You can watch the games on TV all week.

But the best part of the tournament has nothing to do with the games at all. When these kids arrive in Williamsport, coming from every corner of the world, they all move into the same place. It’s called the International Grove, a little village of dorms on the hill above the fields. In that village, every American team shares its floor with a team from another country. Little League designed it that way, and stocked the place accordingly: ping-pong tables, video games, a pool open every day. No parents in the rooms. No public allowed. Just kids.

How does any of it work, with a dozen languages under one roof? Well, the kids figure it out. They point at things, type into translation apps, and teach each other how to say some words their coaches would probably rather they didn’t. They organize pick-up games against the team down the hall, because the tournament isn’t enough, apparently. And they trade pins, the unofficial currency of Williamsport. By Little League’s own telling, that whole tradition started in the 1970s, when a team from Taiwan showed up with custom pins to give away. The most beloved ritual at America’s most American sporting event was brought here by the visitors.

And years later, what do the players remember? Even for baseball legends like Todd Frazier, Williamsport is still “the coolest place ever.” Frazier, who won the tournament as a twelve-year-old in 1998 before spending over a decade in the majors, says that’s because “the differences in culture... makes it so great. The friendships you make there last a lifetime.” Big leaguers who come back for the annual Classic tell Little League’s staff the same thing. Their sharpest memories aren’t the games, they’re the ping-pong.

This evening, the big leagues come to them. The Braves and Brewers are playing a real major league game in Williamsport, with the Little Leaguers in the stands. And for that game every year, the first pitch looks like this:

One ball, passed through the hands of a player from every team, all the way around the world before it ever reaches the plate.

Fear of the foreigner is the loudest voice in the room these days. It’s in the speeches, the headlines, the feeds. Lawrence showed what this country can do when it ignores all that and opens its arms to strangers. But Williamsport shows something even better. Before the fear gets drilled in, nobody needs to open their arms at all, because nobody built the distance in the first place. Put American kids on a floor with kids from the other side of the world and there’s nothing to overcome. They just make friends. That’s our nature. That’s the America I grew up in.

And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam