By 1989, collecting baseball cards had become mainstream. There were more collectors than ever and in response, the card manufacturers printed more and more cards to satisfy the demand.
Unfortunately for collectors, the value of their cards plummeted because there were more cards being produced.
But even though there were a ton of cards produced in the "junk wax" era of the late 80's and early-mid 90's, there were still some absolute gems of cards. Even if they aren't worth a fortune.
This 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken card is absolutely one of those gems and is iconic within the baseball card community.
Billy Ripken hadn't exactly had a stellar year in 1988, batting .207 with 2 HR and 34 RBI in 150 games for the Orioles. And he didn't get much better in 1989.
He certainly didn't get anywhere near the stats of his older brother Cal.
So if Billy Ripken wasn't a star player, what is it that makes this card so iconic?
It's quite simple really. Ripken had posed for the photo holding a bat with "fuck face" clearly written on the knob of his bat.
Ripken had originally claimed to the Baltimore Sun that he had been the victim of a prank by his teammates but in a 2008 interview with CNBC, Ripken explains what really happened.
The story he tells Darren Rovell in 2008 goes like this.
Ripken received a bunch of bats that he decided were too heavy to use in game, but would be fine for batting practice. He needed a way to distinguish between his game bat and the heavier batting practice ones. He - for reasons we can't quite get our heads around - decided that writing his number on the bat would be "confusing" so he wrote the infamous "fuck face" instead.
A result of bad timing - or good timing depending on your perspective - led to Ripken being asked to pose for a photograph just as he finished batting practice at Fenway Park. The photographed happened to be taken by Fleer and Ripken happened to have just used his "fuck face" bat. The rest is history.
Fleer acted to retroactively remove the "fuck face" from their cards. They whited it out, scribbled over it in both black & white and covered it with a black box.
You can usually pick up the unaltered FF card for less than £20, with some of the other variations going for more.
But the big question here is how this photograph managed to get past the quality control at Fleer?
It turns out that that Fleer wasn't exactly meticulous with quality control in 1989.
Randy Johnson's card had to be reprinted 4 times to remove the Marlboro advertisement over his left shoulder and there were many other errors with various player's birthdays and stats.
Bill Ripken didn't have an amazing career but he'll forever be immortalised because he was photographed with his BP bat by Fleer in 1989.
Do you think that there is an iconic card which should be featured here?
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