2009 NPB Team Payroll Ranking
This ranking is based on calculating information from Daily Sports Online, and converting into US dollars at the April 24 dollar-yen exchange rate from Google Finance. The numbers are based on the start of the 2009 season. I hope this will be interesting and insightful for new NPB fans to learn how much Japanese teams pay their players.
| Rank | Team | Payroll | Players Under Contract | Highest Paid Player |
| 1 | Yomiuri Giants | $45.30M | 78 | Seung-Youp Lee, $6.2M |
| 2 | Hanshin Tigers | $40.49M | 74 | Tomoaki Kanemoto, $5.6M |
| 3 | Softbank Hawks | $34.11M | 74 | Nobuhiko Matsunaka, $5.1M |
| 4 | Chunichi Dragons | $30.02M | 70 | Hitoki Iwase, $4.4M |
| 5 | Chiba Lotte Marines | $27.67M | 78 | Naoyuki Shimizu, $2.4M |
| 6 | Seibu Lions | $26.75M | 68 | Kazuhisa Ishii, $2.8M |
| 7 | Orix Buffaloes | $26.04M | 69 | Tuffy Rhodes, $3.3M |
| 8 | Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters | $24.97M | 66 | Atsunori Inaba, $3M |
| 9 | Tokyo Yakult Swallows | $23.77M | 71 | Norichika Aoki,$ 2.6M |
| 10 | Yokohama Baystars | $23.03M | 68 | Shuichi Murata, $2.6M |
| 11 | Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles | $20.74M | 67 | Hisashi Iwakuma, $3M |
| 12 | Hiroshima Toyo Carp | $17.71M | 70 | Katsuhiro Nagakawa, $1.6M |
- One note is that teams with more than 70 players on contract are from the existence of ikusei (training) players.
Wow, I wish MLB would look at this…pretty powerful message. The Giants are roughly equivalent to the Tampa Rays!
Keep in mind, also, that this is for ~70 players under contract. This includes the minor leaguers each team has on the payroll.
Thanks for putting this together Ryo.
I’m a little confused though…how exactly are these numbers calculated? I read “60000” but what does that mean exactly? 60000 yen don’t convert to $6.2 million.
The yen figures are in units of 10,000 (“ichi-man”). So 60,000 is really 600,000,000 which is about $6.2m at the current exchange rate.
Thanks Patrick for the clarification. That is exactly how I calcualted and converted from yen to dollars.
[…] It’s no surprise why Japanese players want to come to the United States to play. That is where the money is. The highest paid payroll in the NPB is the Yomiuri Giants at $45.3 million. The lowest paid payroll in the United States is the Florida Marlins at $36.8 million. To see the list of Japanese team contracts you can go to http://www.npbtracker.com/2009/04/2009-npb-team-payroll-ranking/#content. […]
In perspective, the Lions got 2 years worth of entire payroll for Matsuzaka (and are defending champions at the end of these 2 years)
[…] great timing — just after we published the 2009 NPB Payroll Ranking, the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association announced their 2009 average salary numbers. […]
[…] touched on the ikusei (training) system at the end of my 2009 NPB Team Payroll Ranking piece, but how exactly does that system […]