“It was a lot bigger than we expected,” said Rick Helling, a pitcher for that team who now works for the players’ association. “It was so big they actually made a smaller one that you could purchase to wear. What happened was, the owner was talking like, ‘Hey, if we win this thing, we’re going to have the best ring ever.’ So a lot of the players, like Josh Beckett and Dontrelle Willis, were like, ‘All right — you said it!’ And give him credit, he actually came through. It’s an amazing ring. When people see it, they’re like, ‘Wow!’”
Helling does not wear that ring, though, nor does he wear the much smaller ring he got for playing with the Marlins’ other title team, in 1997, even though he was traded to the Rangers that summer. It is customary, but not mandatory, to give rings to all players who appeared for a team in a championship season, though it wasn’t always that way.
Team owners can always right old wrongs. Peter O’Malley, who succeeded his father, Walter, as the Dodgers’ owner for many years, surprised a former pitcher, Joe Black, with an overdue memento from the team’s 1955 title in Brooklyn.
“Joe had been traded during the ’55 season,” said Leonard Coleman, the former National League president and a close friend of Black, who died in 2002. “One time in Vero Beach he said something to O’Malley like, ‘I didn’t even get a championship ring,’ nothing more than that. But a couple months later, I got a phone call from Joe: ‘You’re not going to believe this, but guess what Peter just sent me? He had a ’55 championship ring made for me!’ Now if you play for the team for a month, you get a ring and the whole works. But back then, they didn’t do it.”

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org