Fortitudo Bologna Acquires Junior Martina
Through its website and social media channels, multiple Italian champions Fortitudo Bologna announced it has signed Curaçao-born Junior Martina for the 2024 season.
The twenty-six-year-old Martina has three seasons of affiliated ball, one season of Indy ball and three seasons in the Dutch hoofdklasse under his belt. After one season with DSS in Haarlem (2018), Martina moved to the USA to play for the Washington Nationals organization (Auburn Doubledays and the Gulf Coast Nationals). After returning to the Dutch Leagues with Oosterhout Twins in 2020, he returned to the US to join the Wilmington Blue Rocks and the Fredericksburg Nationals. In the 2023 season, he played one game for Curaçao Neptunus of the Dutch hoofdklasse but played for the Windy City Thunderbolts in the Frontier League for he bulk of the season.
Martina was born in 1997 in Willemstad Curaçao. He moved to the Netherlands where he grew up playing football (soccer) and baseball. Eventually, he decided to move to Oklahoma (USA) for highschool, and subsequently enrolled at Western Oklahoma State College in Altus, where he studied and played baseball.
At the college level (NJCAA), he closed his first season, batting .373 in forty-eight games, with .482 on base and .677 slugging (thirteen doubles, one triple and eleven home runs) for forty-seven RBI. In 2019 he repeated the great numbers of the previous season (399/475/673 in fifty-five games, with nine doubles, three triples and fourteen home runs for fifty-one RBI).
Due to the pandemic, the Minor League championships are skipped in the 2020 season, so Martina returns to the Dutch Major League; he played 16 games with Oosterhout Twins, where she stood out by batting .315 with five doubles, a triple, a home run and a .422 on-base-percentage.
In 2023, he joined the Windy City Thunderbolts and posted the following numbers: .247 BA, a slugging average of .350, the result of numerous extra bases (fifteen doubles, two triples and six home runs), obtaining the remarkable figures of forty-seven RBI and forty-eight runs scored, to which he also adds elelven stolen bases.
Martina is a typical third sacker, but is able to play other infield positions as well.