This article is probably more interesting to me than it will be to you, but that's only because I have this baseball card. Darren Rovell of CNBC got an interview with Billy Ripken to discuss how the "fuck face" card came to be. I've had the card since I was a kid and I thought I knew the true backstory behind it, but it turns out I didn't. A good read.
I have a large wooden chest filled with baseball cards. Have I mentioned that I'm 29 years old? Have I also mentioned that I'm not really a collector of baseball cards? So why would I still have a large wooden chest filled with them? To me that's a rhetorical question. It's not so much why I continue to keep all the cards that I collected as a kid. It's more a question of why I collected them in the first place.
Example: My prized baseball card continues to be the errored Billy Ripken Fleer card from 1989 where there's a curse word written on the handle of the bat. Ever since I was a kid, that card spoke to me. For one, I loved, and I mean LOVED curse words. I didn't say them myself. But I loved it when other people did. So for me, seeing "F#ck Face" mistakingly written on a baseball card was about as good as it got. Another reason that this card spoke to me was because I was Billy Ripken. Not literally of course. But I was in the sense that I was a sub par baseball player with an older brother who was much better than I was. Billy had Cal's Junior and Senior, with Senior being both his dad and his coach. I had Greg's Junior and Senior, with Senior also being both my dad and my coach. Billy sucked and was probably only a member of the Orioles because his older brother was good. I sucked and was probably only a member of my Little League team because Greg was good. And so it went that I became a fan of Billy's.
I bring this up only because I accidently came across a website that was talking about that very card. The person bringing it up said something like "I remember a friend of mine had an old Billy Ripken card with F#ck Face written on it. Does anybody know what that thing is worth?" and somebody responded to him with "very little, like a buck or two."
A buck or two? No way. Not to me. And that's while I'll never sell it.
I have a large wooden chest filled with baseball cards. Have I mentioned that I'm 29 years old? Have I also mentioned that I'm not really a collector of baseball cards? So why would I still have a large wooden chest filled with them? To me that's a rhetorical question. It's not so much why I continue to keep all the cards that I collected as a kid. It's more a question of why I collected them in the first place.