When you get paid mega bucks to have thousands of people come and watch you play a sandlot game, it must be hard to find something really entertaining to do in your spare time, which could be what led to the now famous Fleer baseball card that had the naughtiest of words displayed prominently on the handle of Bill Ripken’s bat.

Ripken, at that time an infielder for the Baltimore Orioles, and nowhere near the fan draw that his brother and teammate Cal was, posed for the 1989 card in the typical “bat over the shoulder” position. What was not typical, was the tiny but legible scrawl of an obscenity on the bat, noticed almost immediately by hawk-eyed collectors. “Fuck Face” was obviously not the brand name, so where did the words come from?

Initial thoughts were that either Fleer had touched up the photos to cause a sensation, and thus create a collector’s item, or else a disgruntled prankster at their printers, had taken it upon themselves to lighten up an otherwise boring day. Neither was right.

Ripken himself, later admitted that some teammates had scrawled the phrase on the bat as a joke, and neither he, nor the photographer, nor anyone at Fleer had noticed it. While that seems a big stretch, and not even in the seventh inning, there it was. In subsequent printings of the card, the offending words were either covered with a blob of white-out, or inked out with a marker.