Among the Ripken baseball family, it is obviously Cal Ripken Jr. who is the most well known. He’s a prestigious Hall of Famer, and owner of the legendary consecutive games played streak, surpassing the immortal Lou Gehrig. Bill Ripken, his brother, has infamy on his side though. Like El Guapo in the Three Amigos, he’s “so famous that he’s infamous.” Also known as Billy Ripken, he’s forever connected to the most memorable “error card” in the history of card collecting.
Although who could really call 1989 Fleer #616 an “error”? Seems like a baseball card that came correct to me, as it showed him holding a bat with a curse word written in plain view on the knob. While appearing on the latest episode of The Mayor’s Office, Sean Casey’s podcast, Bill Ripken lifted the lid on the NSFW bat that appeared with him in this notorious issue.
“The bat model was R161,” Bill Ripken said of the mother of all error cards, with “FUCK FACE” written on the bat handle. “It was fat, big, and it was heavy and there was no way I could use this in a game. If you wrote your number on the knob of the bat, and you got your bat in the grocery cart – that’s where we kept our bats back in the day – it might take you a little while to find your BP bat.
And, if I was of the mindset that my group was going to hit at 4:45, and I was going to scramble out of my chair at 4:44, I can’t be late! So, you have to find something that you can go out there and hit BP with…. Why I chose that two-word phrase, I have no idea…it was clubhouse humor,” Ripken said, adding that he didn’t think anything of it, during the 1988 photo session at Fenway Park, until he received a call from the Orioles public relations department when the cards were released in January.
“I did it for – if I had six bats in the grocery cart, I could pick my BP bat out real quick because it stood out… it was not done for the purpose of the picture. It was just done for simple clubhouse humor. It was just my BP bat because there’s no way I could have used it in a game because it was too heavy,” he said.
Once an individual becomes synonymous with something specific in life, and it’s something that’s innocent enough (or in this case, well not utterly deplorable), well it’s best to just lean into it. Billy (obviously) is not the Ripken who is first and foremost in the baseball annals, but he does have this on his brother. Several versions of this error card (but really, again how can you call this an “error” given its unique hilarity and timelessness) exist, including one with a black box over the naughty word, another with a whiteout, a scribble, a marker loop, and so on.
Ripken has said in previous interviews that he gave one of these cards to every single groomsman in his wedding party. In other words, he appreciated the novelty of this card as much, if not more than the rest of us. Bill Ripken made baseball history again in 1997 when he singled off San Francisco pitcher Mark Gardner for the first RBI in interleague history.
After retiring from baseball, he partnered with his brother Cal to form Ripken Baseball, which owns three minor league teams: The Aberdeen IronBirds, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans and the Tennessee Smokies.
Bill Ripken, 57, spent 12 years in MLB with the Baltimore Orioles (1987-92; 1996); Texas Rangers (1993-1994, 1997); Cleveland Indians (1995) and Detroit Tigers (1998). He currently works as a radio host for XM Satellite Radio and a studio analyst for MLB Network.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Bank (TheSportsBank.Net) and author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” as well as “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune, and co-hosts the After Extra Time podcast. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.