Dave's Favorite Baseball Cards (Part IV)

1989 Fleer

Billy Ripken #616

Needless to say, I absolutely love this card.

Not long after Fleer released its set of 1989 baseball trading cards, collectors noticed something unusual about the card featuring Bill Ripken (Baltimore Orioles infielder and brother of his much more famous Oriole teammate, Cal Ripken, Jr.): letters printed in black marker on the knob of his bat. The letters were quite readable upon close examination, and they clearly spelled out the phrase "F**K FACE." This was no case of "well, it kind of looks like it might say that"; there was no doubting exactly which two words appeared on Ripken's bat. After the discovery became public, subsequent printings of the card were issued with the offending words obscured in various ways: first hidden under a blob of White Out, then scribbled over with a marking pen, and finally covered by a black square. (The original version is now referred to, in diplomatic collector's parlance, as an "error" card.)

How did the words end up on Ripken's card? Some people offered the standard speculation, that it was a prank pulled off by a Fleer employee who touched up the photograph and added the obscenity. Ripken later admitted that a couple of teammates had scrawled the phrase on his bat as a joke, and he didn't notice until it was too late. Despite Ripken's admission, many card collectors found it rather implausible that Ripken, the photographer, and the card company all failed to notice what was written on the bat and suggested that one or more of them knew about the obscenity but deliberately allowed it to slip through the production process.

Source: snopes.com