Salary

Yeah! Fun with math again!

Here's what you need to do:

1. Go to the Teams page to start.
2. Open each of the team rosters on that page in separate tabs ([Cmd]+click on Macs with either Safari or FireFox - I think middle-click on other systems).
3. Scroll down each roster page to the "Team Salaries" section - then on down to the "Total" line. This was 53.9395-oku for the Giants in 2008.
4. Take the sum that you get from adding the 12 totals together (12 numbers is reasonable compared to 844 players individually).
5. Multiply the sum by 100,000,000 (i.e. move the decimal over 8 places). The reason for this is explained in the legend at the right of each team's salary section.
6. Divide the above result by the current exchange rate [Google Calculator]. I get 106.826194 yen per US Dollar at the moment.
7. If you do this today, you can divide by 844 players to get the average.

Now for the catch. This number is not the actual average. You see, I have 859 players registered this year, but only 844 of them have salaries that were reported (and entered), so 15 current active players are missing salaries. That will have an effect on the final total, but probably not more than a few 100-man yen. (When ever you see a n-man written, just add 4 0's to the end of the number n. Like metrics, the math is really very easy.)

Another problem with this figure is that it includes those players on the Educational roster, where the pay can be below the minimum wage for a ball player of 440-man yen per year. You didn't state if you wanted such players included in your study.

Speaking of purpose, are you just looking for players who are on the ichi-gun (top) roster? How many games registered with the top club would you consider necessary for inclusion? Is this a study for publication, for an academic paper, or are you just curios? If it's important to have official data, I would dig out a copy of the Money issue of Shukan Baseball and quote from it with a disclaimer that it excludes foreign players from the calculations and was calculated as-of a particular date.

I know, I'm a total jerk for not just giving you the answer. But I strongly believe that it's better to teach how to find the answer than to just give it. Also, there are many possible answers to your question, but you haven't yet asked the question in a way that it can be answered with specificity.