Two weeks after Fleer released its 1989 baseball cards, the company received a call from a Baltimore sports reporter seeking a comment on card number 616. When managers looked up the card they saw a photo of Orioles second baseman Billy Ripken holding a bat on his right shoulder. On the knob of the bat were the words FUCK FACE.

The company halted distribution immediately, but this elevated the card from a novelty to a rarity, and the frenzy increased. By January its price has risen to $100; an unopened case could fetch $1,700. Ripken himself signed a few at a Jersey City card show, and the autographed cards became more valuable still. (“If people are crazy enough to spend that kind of money on a card,” he said, “it doesn’t concern me.”)

How the obscenity had made its way unnoticed through Fleer’s production process remains a mystery. The photo had been taken in Boston before an Orioles-Red Sox game in 1988; Ripken eventually admitted that he’d written the expletive himself to identify a practice bat, but he insisted that its appearance in the photo had been an accident.

See Inverted Jenny.

On Aug. 4, 1982, Mets center fielder Joel Youngblood had driven in two runs against Cubs pitcher Ferguson Jenkins in an afternoon game at Wrigley Field when he was traded in mid-game to the Montreal Expos.

He left the game and flew to Philadelphia in time to take up a position in right field at Veterans Stadium at the bottom of the sixth in an evening game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

In the top of the seventh he singled against Steve Carlton. That makes Youngblood the only player in history to get a base hit for two different teams in two different cities on the same day — and he did it against two future Hall of Famers.

Groucho Marx hated Harry Cohn, a producer for Columbia.

At one showing, when the words “Columbia Pictures Presents” appeared on the screen, he turned to Chico and said, “Drags, doesn’t it?”

Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player opens with a tracking shot — one continuous take that lasts nearly 8 minutes.

The filmmakers shot 15 takes, and Altman used take 10 — you can see the slate at the very beginning of this clip.

Alfred Hitchcock planned to shoot his 1948 film Rope in one enormous take, but his cameras would hold only 1,000 feet of film. As it is, the 80-minute film contains only 11 takes.

Charlie Watts draws beds. “I make a sketch of every bedroom I sleep in,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I’ve sketched every bed I’ve slept in on tour since about 1968.”

“It’s a diary,” he told Sue Lawley in 2001. “Now I can’t miss one because it’s like ruining ‘a day in the life of.’ So I just draw every bed that I sleep in when I tour with the Rolling Stones.”

What’s unusual about this position, by Adamson?

Ten discovered checks in a row:

1. Rb2+ Nd3+ 2. Nc4+ N7e5+ 3. Kg3+ gxh5+ 4. Bg5+ Nxb2+ 5. Ne3+ Ned3+

Marcel Duchamp described chess as “the movement of pieces eating one another.”