Some 70 percent of young ballplayers are insecure about post-retirement life, according to a poll on second careers conducted by Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the organization governing Japanese baseball.
For the fifth consecutive year since NPB started the survey targeting young professional ballplayers, 70 percent of respondents said they feel anxious about their future after retiring from baseball. Many players prepare for retirement by saving their salaries, but 10.3 percent of the respondents said they “have no savings,” while 25.4 percent said they “don’t know how much savings (they) have.”
The anonymous survey was conducted in October 2011, targeting 223 young ballplayers, including developmental players, who were playing in the Phoenix League in Miyazaki Prefecture. Respondents had an average age of 23.7 years and an average salary of about 8.29 million yen ($103,900).
The reasons for their concern about the future were due either to income or career choices. Some 43 percent were worried about their career choice, while another 43 percent were concerned about their income. Roughly 60 percent of respondents who said they “have savings” said they have more than 10 million yen in savings. Of those, 19.7 percent said they have between 30 million and 50 million yen in savings. Some 6.6 percent said they have savings of more than 50 million yen.
Asked what kind of job they wanted after retiring from baseball, most respondents showed interest in jobs related to the sport. In a multiple-answer question, a combined 74.4 percent said their top choice would be, or they “were interested” in, “coaching at the high-school level,” while 61.4 percent chose “coaching university teams and working-adults teams.”
Asked about their top choice for a post-retirement career, 28.4 percent of respondents cited, “coaching at the high-school level.” This answer ranked No. 1 for the third consecutive year. “Opening a restaurant or bar” ranked second with 13 percent, followed by “coaching university teams and working-adults teams,” which got 11.7 percent. “Coaching and managing professional baseball teams” fell from second place in the previous survey to fifth place in this year’s survey.
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