An important milestone on your inexorable march toward bleak death is the sudden realization that most professional athletes are younger than you are. To help this along, the tool below calculates the percentage of players in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB who are already younger than you are at this very moment.


Just punch your birthday into the field on the right and hit submit. The height of the bars is proportional to the frequency of each age in each league—as a percentage—instead of the total number of players of a certain age; this adjusts for the fact that these sports have different roster sizes.

Please note: We're trying a new type of graphic here. It's going to look weird on your phone (Kinja's problem), and it's probably not going to work on Internet Explorer or older browsers (my problem).


Birthdays were scraped from the appropriate Sports Reference site. The players in each league are current as of Monday, April 29, and their ages—calculated from their birthdays and represented in the histograms—are current as of Wednesday. The data include:

2,339 NFL players, active at some point during the 2013 season.

563 NBA players, active at some point during the 2013-14 season.

983 NHL players, active at some point during the 2013-14 season.

889 MLB players, who have appeared at least once in the 2014 season.

The code for the graphic and birthday scrapers is available on GitHub.