You’re looking at a Topps 1969 Aurelio Rodriguez baseball card, lucky you. Rodriguez, a third baseman, played for seven different teams over the course of a relatively undistinguished 16-year career. He ended up with a lifetime .237 batting average, which, to be honest, isn’t merely undistinguished. It’s plain old bad.

In all fairness, Rodriguez was pretty good in the field - he beat out Brooks Robinson for the Gold Glove award one year, and that was almost impossible to do - but it’s not like people were getting drunk and singing songs about him. So why then, you might wonder, did somebody take the time to press his rookie card between two thick pieces of plastic, the better to keep it in sharp-cornered, super-pristine, mint-style condition?

Because that’s not Aurelio Rodriguez, stupid. In fact, that guy’s not even a baseball player.

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I collected a lot of baseball cards when I was an Alabama-bogged tyke back in the 1970s, and I was always fascinated by “error cards”— that is, cards that have a misprinted picture or some misleading piece of information on them. For instance, I recall that there’s a Hank Aaron card from the late 1950s (when the Braves were still in Milwaukee) in which the negative was accidentally flipped, so Hammerin’ Hank is batting left-handed and has a backwards number 44 on his uniform. If this guy were to hit a home run, he’d run to third to second to first to home, only to be called “Uot!” by the umpire, at which point Milwaukee fans would almost certainly oob. Think about it.

Error cards can be worth a lot of money if the company that manufactures them catches the mistake early enough and withdraws the cards from circulation, thus limiting the number available. But if nobody notices until it’s too late, the market is flooded with the damn things and they’re more of a curiosity than anything else.

Which brings us back to Aurelio Rodriguez…or should I say, “Aurelio Rodriguez.”

When Topps’ photographer showed up at the Los Angeles Angels’ spring training camp in 1969 to snap pictures for that year’s series of cards, he was told that Rodriguez was a young guy who could barely speak a word of English. Unfortunately, the Angels forgot to point out that the very same thing could be said of Leonard Garcia, their trusty batboy.

Nobody really remembers if Garcia realized what was going on, but he knelt down and posed for the photographer, who then marked Rodriguez off his list. Whoops! However, according to my friend, Richard Ticho, the owner of baseballcardcollectors.com, the card isn’t worth very much because Topps printed a shitload of them. It turns out somebody wasted two pieces of perfectly good plastic on this one, unless they can unload the "rarity" on a collector who doesn't know any better and has too many bucks in his pocket.

I guess there was no harm done, though, except that Rodriguez missed out on his first opportunity to appear on a baseball card. But he was on lots of other cards over the years. He certainly got off better than Billy Ripken (the considerably less legendary brother of Cal) who made a regrettable mistake when posing for his Fleer card in 1989.

Here’s the card. In case you’re having trouble seeing what it says there on the knob of Billy's bat, a close-up as been thoughtfully provided: