Julio Franco is 56 years old and still playing baseball and not in one of those over-40 leagues where the pitchers throw 56-mph fastballs. He signed on with a semi-pro team in Japan as a player-manager and while it's not the major leagues or even the Fort Worth Cats -- Franco played seven games for them last summer -- it's still a paying gig and that's pretty awesome.

Franco made his major league debut with the Phillies in 1982 and hit .309 in 2004 -- a season he turned 46. He played his last game in the majors when he was 49. In between, he registered 2,586 hits in the major leagues plus 286 in two different seasons in Japan. He played in Korea in 2000 where he got 156 more hits and in Mexico in 2001 where he pounded out 178 hits while hitting .437 before returning to the majors later that season. Given an uninterrupted major league career he probably finishes with 3,000 career hits.

One of Franco's teammates on those '82 Phillies was 41-year-old Pete Rose, who was a teammate in his rookie season with Joe Nuxhall, who debuted with the Reds in 1944 as a 15-year-old. Gee Walker was a teammate on those '44 Reds and Walker once played with Wally Schang, who played under Connie Mack on the 1913 Philadelphia A's. Harry Davis was a reserve on that team and Davis first appeared in the major leagues in 1895. If you want six degrees of separation, one of the players in the National League in 1895 was Cap Anson, who was born in 1852, nine years before the start of the Civil War.

Anyway, keep playing, Julio. You can grow old in retirement.