Demographics of NPB

Try Jim Albright's baseball guru web site - particularly JapanBaseballDaily.com. This should give you some of the history.

[Editor's note: BaseballGuru.com was founded and is run by Craig Tomarkin. Jim Albright and Gary Garland are the Japanese Insiders at the Guru. JapanBaseballDaily.com is an off-shoot run by Baseball Guru Garland-san.]

Business and finance are weak spots for me. I don't know where to even begin looking for such information (other than Google, but I don't know keywords for the subject in Japanese).

You didn't say if you were looking for demographics for the professional game, high school or college level, or "just for fun" baseball.

In the final category, I can say that our local team (made up of members of the community I live in) consists of players in their low 20s through their 70s. We have enough players on our team to make up two teams in local tournaments, one team consisting of all "over-35" players (we get to use a DH in one of the tournaments if everyone is over 35) and the younger team which includes some (like me) over 35 as well. Our secondary ace pitcher (when the ace is off on his ship) also plays in an over-65 league which has no shortage of teams.

Obviously, the majority of our local team is over 35, with quite a few players doubling in the over-65 league. There are several father-son(s) combinations. When I started eight years ago, a few of the players were under 20, but we haven't gotten any new players that young since then.

The teams we face at the tournaments also have a wide age range on pretty much all of them. There are new, young faces on several of the teams each year, so people do continue coming in. I have no numbers, but the feeling I get is that, overall, the average age of participants is aging, though.

Note: This is all in the suburbs of Tokyo (southern Yokohama). Stagnation for the Nojima team is mainly due to very few people moving out/into the area compared to other locations in the area. For example, one of the recent new teams made up from people from a new condominium was actually pretty young, made up of people who had recently moved into the area. So different areas will have different turn-over, I'm sure.

Also, as far as I know, I'm the only foreigner on any of the teams. (Some of the younger guys on a couple of teams look like "Yankees," with wild hair, ear rings, and such, but I'm pretty sure that they're Japanese.) All of this is part of the "real Japan," not some Little America suburb (like Roppongi).