Iconic Baseball Card Snub

Over at Cut4, they put together a bracket of the most iconic baseball cards of all-time. It’s a fun tourney and I love to see baseball cards getting attention. However, they snubbed what is probably my favorite baseball card and surely an iconic one. You can check the bracket out here and likely guess the card I’m thinking about: https://www.mlb.com/news/best-baseball-card-top-of-the-pack-bracket-challenge

The Snub

My dad owns one baseball card. Just one. And that’s the card I feel was snubbed. The Billy Ripken “Fuck Face” card. One of the great things about baseball cards is that they capture a moment in time. The year is 1989 and Fleer has released a new set of cards, with multiple error cards. Was Creed Bratton running quality assurance for Fleer? Probably. But one error card set itself apart from all other error cards. Billy Ripken’s “Fuck Face” bat handle is amazing on its own. What needs to be considered though, is that at that time, hearing or seeing the word “fuck” on TV or in print was not common at all. There weren’t foul mouth bloggers/podcasters. Cable television was not widely consumed. And opening a pack of baseball cards as a kid and seeing a Fuck Face card was the equivalent of finding a stack of Hustler mags on your front porch, amazing. So yeah, I feel it was snubbed.

-Chorizy-E