The performance of baseball's best, as a tradable index.
Long Ball Markets turns Wins Above Replacement — baseball's most trusted measure of player value — into a transparent, versioned settlement index. Retail binary ladders on a regulated exchange. Custom swaps and collars for institutions that carry real player risk.
Two products. One settlement stack.
Every instrument settles by the same mechanical, no-discretion procedure against the versioned WAR Index — the difference is the wrapper.
Binary ladder contracts
Simple Call/Put binaries at laddered strikes: “Will Bobby Witt Jr.'s 2027 WAR Index finish ≥ 6.0?” Prices quote 0–100 and read directly as probabilities. Max loss is the premium paid — no margin calls, ever. Designed for listing on a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market with full secondary trading.
Custom swaps & collars
Fixed-for-floating WAR swaps and zero-cost collars, negotiated bilaterally under ISDA. A club hedges the back half of a $500M commitment; an agent locks in a client's projection ahead of free agency; a fund takes uncorrelated exposure to elite athletic performance.
Backtested against the greatest careers ever played.
We reconstructed the WAR Index over ten Hall-of-Fame-caliber careers spanning 1914–2010. Career totals reproduce public records exactly; award seasons land in each player's top index seasons.
The launch watchlist.
Liquidity comes from concentration, not breadth: eight high-interest players, three to five instruments each, two to three strikes per ladder. Current-season values are provisional.
| Player | Career index | Seasons | Peak season | Data tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aaron Judge | 64.2 | 11 | 10.9 | Established |
| Shohei Ohtani | 57.4 | 9 | 9.9 | Established |
| Juan Soto | 45.4 | 9 | 8.0 | Established |
| Bobby Witt Jr. | 26.8 | 5 | 9.6 | Established |
| Pete Crow-Armstrong | 14.0 | 4 | 5.9 | Established |
| James Wood | 8.8 | 3 | 4.2 | Established |
| Nick Kurtz | 8.7 | 2 | 5.0 | Established |
| Kevin McGonigle | 4.7 | 1 | 4.7 | Rookie sample |
Built for the regulator first.
No discretion at settlement
Injury, trade, retirement, two-way play — every edge case resolves mechanically by index construction. No committee, no adjustments, no “fair value” rulings.
Version-pinned contracts
The index is semantically versioned with a public changelog. Every contract names the version it settles against; changes never apply retroactively.
Reproducible by anyone
Settlement values publish with the input data hash, index version, and computation code reference. Any counterparty can recompute any settlement.