Baseball diplomacy project launches trivia game bridging U.S.-Japanese history

The trivia game is nearly three years in the making and plays a vital role in the U.S.-Japan Baseball Diplomacy Project, which studies the relationship between the two nations.

Helmed by Distinguished University Professor of Government Paul Manna, the trivia game is nearly three years in the making. Image by Emmaline Nelsen

"Play ball!" takes on an entirely different meaning with William & Mary's new Baseball Diplomacy Game, taking players on an immersive journey through both Japanese and American baseball history throughout the past 150 years.

Launched in June, the game is free and available on the US-Japan Baseball Diplomacy Project homepage, playable on both desktop and mobile.

Helmed by Distinguished University Professor of Government Paul Manna, the trivia game is nearly three years in the making. During that period Manna worked with students to develop initial ideas and background research for questions. He then took the lead in drafting them with other project co-leaders, Government Chair Marcus Holmes and William E. Pullen Associate Professor of History Hiroshi Kitamura, who proofed and edited them. Two student assistants built the game code for the interface.

"Marcus, Hiroshi and I thought it'd be really fun to do an educational quiz game that could model itself on some previous ideas," Manna said. "The questions here are really about the U.S. and Japanese relationship. We use baseball to help people learn things about that topic they might not have known."

The trivia game plays a vital role in the U.S.-Japan Baseball Diplomacy Project, which has explored baseball relations between the two countries in multiple ways. Two symposia, one at William & Mary and one in Tokyo, convened experts and baseball practitioners to exchange ideas. Those events included Kitamura sitting down with distinguished guests to do oral history interviews, another main feature of the project.

In addition, a series of research projects from more than 30 undergraduate students at William & Mary have explored baseball and the broader topic of cultural diplomacy. Finally, in August 2024, the project was able to send a team from the Williamsburg Youth Baseball League to Kamakura, Japan for a series of exhibition games.

Launched in 2023, the project was made possible through a grant from the United States Department of State through the U.S. Embassy in Japan to commemorate the 150^th year of U.S.-Japan baseball diplomacy.

A bilingual product

The setup of the game is simple: It's the bottom of the ninth, and players must answer a series of questions centered on U.S. and Japanese baseball history to pack the bases on the field and try to help their team engineer a come-from-behind win. When answered correctly, the player gets a hit at random, ranging from a single to a home run. Answer enough questions correctly, and you win the game. Get three strikes, or three incorrect answers, and you're out.

"There's a random probability of what type of hit you're going to get," Manna explained. "We wanted to incorporate that because it emulates the randomness that is part of baseball that fans would readily recognize."

The game can be played both in Japanese and English, with the option to play as Team USA or Team Japan. Manna stressed the importance of ensuring the game is bilingual, creating a bridge between Japanese speakers and English speakers around the world. That spirit resides at the heart of the project's overall theme of baseball diplomacy, which recognizes baseball as a global sport.

"We wanted to make sure we had a bilingual product," he said. "That was really important to us and the U.S. Embassy in Japan staff we worked with on the grant."

Previously, Manna had worked on a similar trivia game focused on the Supreme Court, called "Oyez Baseball," which compared Supreme Court justices and law to baseball. He improved upon that framework to make this game more interactive, including images, an overhead view of a baseball field and links in trivia answers for players to learn more about baseball past and present.

The game website was built and coded by two computer science majors, Jeremy Swack '24 and Aaraj Vij '23. The duo, who cofounded the company Verba AI after graduating, had done work with Chancellor Robert M. Gates '65, L.H.D. '98, and his consulting firm, and had become known amongst faculty as a reliable source in the international relations program for coding and building.

For Swack, it was also an opportunity to invest in a passion of his own.

"I'm a big baseball guy," he said. "So when the opportunity to build something in baseball lined up, it seemed like a really good fit."

Swack and Vij initially started on the project in their senior year at William & Mary, working through it until the beginning of 2025. The two sole student workers who stayed on through the entirety of the project, they juggled the work while also building their company. Swack called it a "fitting last project" for his time at William & Mary.

"It was honestly quite fun to put together," he said. "It was just a really wonderful thing to have on kind of in the background."

He also credits the work he invested in this project and the work he continues to build with his company to William & Mary's exceptional academics and investment in students' futures.

"I owe 99% of what I'm doing to William & Mary," he said. "The skills and things I learned, and being in the classroom, learning from great professors … the four years I was here really primed me for the kind of stuff I'm working on now."

Intergenerational connections

For the baseball diplomacy project, the work continues. There are still conversations about doing an inverse of the Little League trip to Japan, with Manna, Holmes and Kitamura all hoping eventually to bring a Japanese team to Williamsburg to play ball.

Ultimately, Manna hopes that the game can be educational, teaching players something new and having them come away with a newfound appreciation for the sport and its ability to connect people across the globe.

"Our hope is that kids will sit down and play this with their parents," he said. "Maybe the parents are going to see some names on here that they don't necessarily know, but that their kids might know. And parents might have knowledge of some of the historical events and other players we highlight, which they can share with their kids. Overall, it's a game for fans of all ages."

William Oster, Communications Specialist

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