Classic Orioles Card: Billy Ripken, 1989

He admitted years later that he wrote the expletive on the knob. But he forgot it was there when he posed for a baseball card photographer before a game at Fenway Park.

During my recent Bird Tapes Podcast interview with Billy Ripken, I asked him about his infamous 1989 baseball card with the expletive scrawled on the bottom of the bat’s knob. I assumed pretty much everyone who followed baseball, and particularly the Orioles, knew about the card. But after I published the interview, I heard from a bunch of subscribers who had never heard the story.

It surprised me, but I guess 37 years is a long time.

With that in mind, I’m bolstering my series on classic cards with a post about what surely is the most famous Orioles card of all — Billy’s Fleer card for 1989.

There it is with this post. Check out the knob of the bat. Do I have to explain why it caused a sensation?

Here’s the story. In September 1988, the Orioles were in Boston for a series against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. A photographer working for Fleer was looking to snap pictures of players for the next year’s cards. During batting practice, Billy was the only Oriole wearing his game uniform top, as opposed to a practice top. The photographer stopped him and asked him to pose. Billy agreed to do it. The shot was snapped and both guys went on their way, never imagining a moment of pure infamy had just transpired.

(Click here to read a 2010 interview with the photographer.)

Billy was wielding a batting practice bat, which teams carry in bulk for their players and roll out en masse before games. Occasionally a player scrawls an identifying mark on his bat to make it stand out and keep him from having to sort through the whole lot every day. It wouldn’t have been off brand for Billy, with his impish sense of humor, to write such a thing on his bat. When the card came out the next year and a furor arose, Billy told the Baltimore Sun’s Tim Kurkjian that a teammate had pranked him and written the expletive. Years later, Billy confessed to CNBC that he’d written it. But he forgot about it when he posed for the picture that became the card.

To this day, there are conspiracy theories about how the card actually made it to print. Card companies carefully check all photos before green-lighting them for public consumption. How could the double-checkers (plural) miss such an obvious gaffe? The “conspiracy” in the theory says Fleer purposefully let the card hit the market, knowing it would attract tremendous attention.

When the furor erupted, Fleer paused production and went through gyrations to re-cast the image without the expletive showing. (See below.) The company denied having intentionally allowed the original image to reach the market.

Rather than run from the controversy, Billy elected to have fun with it. Fleer sent him a batch of cards. He gave signed cards to the groomsmen in his wedding.

Predictably, the card’s value initially soared but eventually crashed. These days, you can buy one for less than the price of a sandwich.

But the card’s infamy endures. Billy went on to forge a 12-year playing career in the major leagues, but years later, whenever he speaks to groups in his role as youth baseball tournament operator, he knows a question about the card is coming.

He’ll never outrun it.