About Wallop
A Product of the Wallop Lumber Co.
Wallop exists in an adjacent reality. One where the Wallop Lumber Company of Knockwood, Washington — purveyors of fine paper products, dugout benches, and bleachers since 1907 — is making a push to break their new bat into the major leagues. The online game is a companion piece to that campaign: a new generation of owners reviving something their parents once tried with a parlor game decades ago.
In this reality, uniform styles never made it past the 1940s. Team names and histories took a vaguely skewed course away from the ones we know. The Pittsburgh Whiskey Rebellion still plays on the confluence. The Chicago Fair Play Committee never changed their name. And somewhere on a highway between stadiums, two men in an old station wagon are trying to get a small W burned into every knob in every dugout.
The game you're playing is a faithful reproduction of the original, printed on Wallop Lumber Co. No. 42 Heritage Cream stock. Some things are best left exactly as they were.
The Game
Wallop is a fantasy baseball game built around one thing: the home run. Draft six MLB hitters, pit them against your friends' teams. Earn points every time one of your players goes deep. No pitching staffs, no batting averages, no sabermetrics spreadsheets. Just the most exciting play in baseball, unfolding across eight chapters with the people you care about.
A Wallop season runs from Opening Day through the final out of the World Series. The regular season builds a foundation; the postseason can blow it wide open. Grand slams earn bonus points. Postseason home runs are multiplied — a World Series homer is worth four times the regular value. Every team stays in contention until the last pitch of October.
The weekly rhythm is light by design. Set your lineup, check your waivers, follow the scores. Wallop asks for a few minutes of your week, not a few hours of your day.
Where It Came From
In 2011, Gus Ramsey wrote a piece for Grantland about his family's home run league — a low-maintenance fantasy game they'd named after a Florida hotel and had been running for decades. Each person drafted a handful of hitters and scored points on home runs. That was it. No daily lineups, no injury reports, no 14-category scoring matrices. Just a draft, a season, and a group chat that lit up every time somebody went yard.
The idea stayed lodged in the back of our heads for over a decade. When we finally sat down to build it, we did what any reasonable person would do: we simulated it to death. Three hundred simulations across five recent MLB seasons, four roster configurations, five league sizes. We tested larger rosters, different bench structures, extra scoring categories, commissioner-configurable settings.
The Langfords' original had a simplicity and elegance we could not improve on. Six players, four active, one bench, one lockable reserve. Home runs only. The configuration that produced the tightest races, the most dramatic postseason swings, and the fewest moments where a manager felt like they had nothing to do — was the one a family had been playing for years.
So we built our game around that core.
Who Makes It
Wallop is the passion project of Applied Might, a small product design company. We charge a low, season-long price per league to defer a portion of our costs. No renewing subscriptions, minimal information collected.
Our philosophy is simple: Wallop is not an engagement product. It does not send "we miss you" emails. It does not manufacture urgency with countdown timers and red badges. It does not track session duration or optimize for daily active users. When baseball is over, Wallop is quiet. The off-season is a feature.
The right success metric for Wallop is one that resists quantification: did a group of friends enjoy a full season together? Everything we build is in service of that question.