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Not long after Fleer released its set of 1989 baseball trading cards, collectors noticed something unusual about the card featuring Bill Ripken (Baltimore Orioles infielder and brother of his much more famous Oriole teammate, Cal Ripken, Jr.): letters printed in black marker on the knob of his bat. The letters were quite readable upon close examination, and they clearly spelled out the phrase F**K FACE. This was no case of well, it kind of looks like it might say that; there was no doubting exactly which two words appeared on Ripken's bat: After the discovery became public, subsequent printings of the card were issued with the offending words obscured in various ways: first hidden under what looked like a blob of Wite-Out, then apparently scribbled over with a marking pen, and finally covered by a black square. (The original version is now referred to, in diplomatic collector's parlance, as an error card.) How did the words F**K FACE end up on Ripken's card? Some observers offered the standard speculation that it was a prank pulled off by a Fleer employee who touched up the photograph and added the obscenity, while Ripken himself claimed that the furtive scrawling of an obscene phrase on the knob of his bat was an antic pulled off by some of his teammates that had passed unnoticed by him at the time. (In the event, many card collectors found it rather implausible that Ripken, the photographer, and the card company all failed to notice what was written on the bat and suggested that one or more of them knew about the obscenity but deliberately allowed it to slip through the production process.) In December 2008, however, CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell wrote that Ripken had revealed to him that he (Ripken) had written the offending phrase on the bat himself: Just as others had speculated at the time of the card's release, Ripken suggested that Fleer had not missed the obscenity visible in the photograph used for his card, but rather had allowed it to pass through the production process in order to generate publicity:
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