Rick Face

Musings on that famous 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken card

Rick Face

The first time you glance at the 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken card, you probably won’t see what makes it so notorious.

The obscenity on the knob of the bat actually looks like it says “Rick” the first time you glance at it.

It’s only after taking a real good look at the card that you’ll realize just what happened. And that’s precisely the reason why this is the most notorious and famous of the junk wax era baseball cards.

Now, the most fascinating thing to me is the fact that these cards had been on sale for a few weeks before Fleer discovered the problem and started trying to fix things.

There were a few reasons why Fleer simply overlooked this kind of error. The most obvious is that Fleer was trying to pump out as many cards as humanly possible, since that’s what everybody in the baseball card world was doing in the late 1980s. The second reason, though, is that you’d have to actually stop and look closely to realize just what it says on that bat knob.

Of course, this particular SNAFU would have likely been another obscure piece of baseball card history if the media hadn’t learned about it early on.

But, of course, the media knew about it - and published article after article about it.

From Daily Times-Advocate (Escondido, California, January 19, 1989)

This AP article appeared in newspapers all over North America in mid-January 1989, causing an otherwise obscure card for a player who had a poor 1988 season to suddenly explode in interest.

From The Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1989, part A page 8

Within a few weeks, the card was selling for pretty big money:

From The Citizen (Solana Beach, California), February 1, 1989, page C1

Of course, if Fleer had simply ignored the obscenity, chances are that the phenomenon would have died down quickly.

However, Fleer tried to fix it using different types of ink and different methods.

It seems that the white scribbling method is the rarest and commands the most money:

Of course, it’s actually pretty easy to see what the card said under the white scribbles, especially if you use a loupe

There’s also a white box version, which seems to be even rarer:

And, of course, there’s the black box version, which I think is the most common:

It seems to be impossible to predict whether a wax box will have the uncensored version or one of the censored variants. However, there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that cello packs only contain the uncensored version.

And so, if you’re interested in a notorious card, have a good time hunting!