Along with Mom and apple pie, Little League baseball symbolizes wholesome Americana. But just as apple pie is fattening and Mom won’t stop nagging you to come visit, neither is Little League an unalloyed good. Little League was founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s by a man named Carl Stotz who grew to hate what his creation became. “Originally, I had envisioned baseball for youngsters strictly on the local level without national playoffs and World Series and all that stuff,” Stotz later said, according to Mark Hyman in his book on youth sports, Until It Hurts. Then, in the 1950s, businessmen essentially staged a hostile takeover, forced Stotz out of the league, and proceeded to turn it into the worldwide entity that it is today, with its international World Series and its ESPN affiliation. “The national organization with headquarters here [in Williamsport] began developing into a Frankenstein. I became utterly disgusted,” said Stotz. He died a bitter man.

Stotz found the bigness of Little League to be awful in part because it seemed like an exploitative ploy that used kids’ athletic ambitions to fill adult-sized voids. As the league grew and became more corporate, there was less and less opportunity for kids to enjoy the thrill of low-stakes, good-natured organized competition. In his fascinating paper “ ‘A Diamond Is a Boy’s Best Friend’: The Rise of Little League Baseball, 1939-1964,” University of Chicago historian Michael H. Carriere argues that Little League was a force for normative morality in a postwar America terrified that children would fall prey to sexual perversion, juvenile delinquency, and, presumably, the beatnik menace. For children, Carriere argues, Little League served to reinforce social order; it was “a highly supervised activity that engendered in children a healthy respect for law and order, taught proper gender roles, and, most importantly, brought families together.”

Little League has been invested with an importance that just screwing around in a vacant lot will never have.