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20th Anniversary Of The Billy Ripken Card

Billy Ripken, former Baltimore Oriole, is famous for three things. In reverse order, they are: (3) his pro baseball career; (2) being related to the Iron Man, Cal Ripken, Jr.; and (1) his 1988 Fleer baseball card.

It has, amazingly, been twenty years since that card debuted, and Billy is finally willing to talk about it. Says Billy:

I got a dozen bats in front of my locker during the 1988 season. I pulled the bats out, model R161, and noticed--because of the grain patterns--that they were too heavy. But I decided I'd use one of them, at the very least, for my batting practice bat.

Now I had to write something on the bat. At Memorial Stadium, the bat room was not too close to the clubhouse, so I wanted to write something that I could find immediately if I looked up and it was 4:44 and I had to get out there on the field a minute later and not be late. There were five big grocery carts full of bats in there and if I wrote my number 3, it could be too confusing. So I wrote F--k Face on it.

After the season was over, in early January, I got a call from our PR guy Rick Vaughn. He said, "Billy, we have a problem." And he told me what was written on the bat and I couldn't believe it. I went to a store and saw the card and it all came back to me. We were in Fenway Park and I had just taken my first round of BP. I threw my bat to the third base side and strolled around the bases. When I was coming back, right before I got up to hit again, I remember a guy tapping me on the shoulder asking if he could take my picture. Never once did I think about it. I posed for the shot and he took it.

That card was central to my eighth grade experience. My friends and I were all really into baseball card collecting -- we knew the value of all cards (thanks to Beckett), we got together to organize our cards and put them into binders, we swapped cards, we sold them... hell, we even went to card conventions whenever we could talk a parent into taking us.

Most of our conversations focused on one of four topics: sports, Nintendo (the original NES, thank you), baseball cards and, increasingly (the soon to be dominant topic) girls.

When the Billy Ripken card came out, all discussion revolved around it. Did someone at Fleer doctor the card? Did someone play a joke on Billy? Did Billy sneak the bat into the photo? (Thanks to this theory, we were all Billy Ripken fans that season.)

Fleer's cards were generally considered second-tier, but now everyone was buying packs of Fleer cards. The kids from wealthier families were buying whole boxes of Fleer cards, just to find this card. When one guy found a card, the whole school would know by second period. People who'd previously only each other by site now appeared to be fast friends, tied by the bond of the treasure hunt.

This hunt only lasted for a little while. The card, though tough for us to find at our one middle school, really wasn't all that rare, and the value of the card dropped as more copies were found. And then Fleer announced that they'd pulled the card -- only a corrected (and therefore worthless) version of the Billy Ripken card would be issued from then on. The treasure hunt ruined, we went back to our ordinary middle school lives.

For some reason, my interest in baseball cards died at the end of this period. I don't think I grew out of it... I mean,  I still love video games, so why not baseball cards? Instead, I think that I'd been spoiled. I'd experienced comraderie, the thrill of the hunt. By contrast, the rest of the hobby felt shallow and lifeless.

And so ended my baseball collecting career. Still, Billy's card remains one of those rare pieces of shared history for people my age. Mention F--k Face, The Code, or Who Broke My Window?, and people my age will know exactly what you're talking about. Those ties are rare, and I cherish them. So thanks Billy, and thank you Fleer, for creating such a momentus childhood memory.

[Via kottke]