The cardboard glove...

Seventy five year old catcher Juan S. Martinez will be making the trip to Phoenix on October 19th to play with the Golden Aces at the 2009 Men's Senior Baseball League World Series.

Martinez will be one of two Golden Aces catchers who will see action at the series. Martinez, in his second week of workouts with the Tucson team, said, "I've been around a long time, but you know what? I never get tired of strapping on the gear. I love playing ball and I love catching."

And he's been doing it since he was knee high to a grasshopper.

"I grew up in Douglas, Arizona, back in the early 1940s, and we were pretty poor. We didn't have a lot of things." And that included baseball gloves. "I remember we used to get pieces of cardboard and then we'd shape them into a glove. We'd use staples, glue, whatever we could find to form the cardboard into a glove."

According to Martinez, the makeshift glove did the trick and it certainly was a little easier on the fingers, especially when he was required to knock down a hard hit ball. Another obstacle he faced as a young boy in the barrio was his size, or shall we say lack of. "I'm 5 feet 4 now and I was a little fella then. I got into my share of scrapes. I won a few and lost a few."

When he moved to Tucson with his family, they settled on the south side of town and it didn't get any easier. "I was still so small. I was always getting picked on. I finally got tired of it. So I asked some of the members of the gang to get a hold of their leader...and they did. I got beat up pretty bad, but after that, they left me alone."

Juan has a different battle to deal with now... and that's "father time". Golden Aces manager Mike Morales, who is also the starting catcher on the squad, put the over-sixty team through a two hour practice Saturday at one of the annex fields at Tucson Electric Park...and the early morning sun didn't waste anytime getting up over the mountains.

"It gets pretty hot. Sometimes there's some bad throws and I get a little tired of chasing them," Martinez said, jokingly.

Chasing balls to the backstop is nothing compared to what he went through as a young man."I spent a lot of time in the service. First, I was in the Air Force and they sent me to Germany. I couldn't join the Army because I already had two brothers who had gone before me," Martinez added. "After that I came back to Tucson, I joined up with the Air National Guard and did aircraft maintenance. I ended my career in the service with the Navy Seabees."

Of course, there was always baseball to be played. Juan is a member of the Tucson Old Pueblo Baseball Club.The club's home field is Santa Rita Park and they've been playing there since the mid 1970s. But for now, he'll be a member of the Golden Aces and he won't be taking the field with a cardboard glove.

Things have changed.