Cal Ripken

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Sunday Fun-Day Fun Facts

By joecoolio66 on | From canadacardworldblog.com

Billy Ripken made his major league debut on July 11, 1987 and it marked the first time that a father had managed two sons on the same team. Billy Ripken played alongside his brother, future Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. and was managed by his father, Cal Ripken, Sr. during his time with the Baltimore Orioles in 1987 and 1988. Actually, all three Ripkens appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated during the early part of the 1988 MLB season as the Orioles had lost their first 21 games of the season.

Unfortunately for Billy Ripken, he is mainly remembered for two things during his long MLB career which lasted over 10 seasons. Firstly, he is remembered for being Cal Ripken’s brother and secondly, for an infamous baseball card mistake.

In 1989, Ripken’s Fleer baseball card showed him holding a bat with the expletive ‘fuck face’ written on the knob of the bat. Fleer did not notice the error originally but rushed to correct the error in future print runs. In their haste, Fleer released many variations in which the text was scrawled over with a marker, whited out with correction fluid, and also airbrushed.

On the final corrected version, Fleer obscured the offensive words with a black box and this version was included in factory sets. Both the original card and many of the corrected versions have become collector’s items as a result. There are at least ten different variations of this card. Even though the days of putting a higher value on error cards and corrected versions are barely worth a mention in today’s hobby world, the Ripken error and variations still command good prices on eBay to this day.

In later years, Billy Ripken admitted to having written the expletive on the bat; however, he claimed he did it to distinguish it as a batting practice bat. Some collectors list the card as the “Rick Face” card since the script on the bat appears to make the bad word look similar to Rick.