Usually, Balfour will design the best ring it can imagine before discussing the budget with team ownership. Management then brings in the veteran players to take a look, and to offer designing input. After the 1999 title, Roger Clemens was so impatient to show off his long-awaited champion’s status that he designed his own hefty ring, with the help of a designer friend, to complement the team’s official ring.
Jeter hasn’t looked at his rings in a while, but says his favorite is still the one custom-made by Clemens.
“When we get rings, a lot of people get them,” Jeter said. “The idea of having a ring that only the players got – the players, coaches and The Boss – that was pretty cool.”
– Filip Bondy, N.Y. Daily News.
Bondy put together an excellent collection of information about World Series rings here, and I urge you to check it out. For one thing, I learned that Chili Davis requested one of his World Series rings be inscribed with “Chili Dawg” instead of his proper name, but his wishes were vetoed by the fascist killjoys who run the Yankees.
As for the excerpted bit, what a typically annoying and presumptuous thing for Roger Clemens to do. Imagine you’re a jewelry designer. You’ve spent years training and honing your craft, and you know that your big contract — the World Series ring — is one of your best shots to publicize the fruits of your labor.
It’s not the easiest gig of your year, as you want to create something unique, but that incorporates tradition, and something appropriate for front-office types to wear to their suburban barbecues but flashy enough to suit the fancies of the players. Plus once it’s all done you’ve got to subject your design to the approval of a bunch of guys who haven’t spent nearly as many hours thinking about ring design as you have.
But you weather it all because it’s a great contract, and because you know when it’s all done your work will be broadcast on the evening news and proudly displayed on the fingers of 25 living, breathing, posturing billboards.
Then, as you’re tinkering away, crafting your annual showpiece, you get the news: Roger Clemens, perhaps on edge from all the Icy Hot on indecent parts of his body, wants his World Series ring NOW RIGHT NOW, like a petulant child. And so Roger Clemens, because he’s got unlimited resources and couldn’t care less about your artistic process, just went out and made his own damn World Series ring.
Obviously.
And then to top it off, Jeter — Derek Jeter, the Captain, the guy who has yet to say something wrong in his entire career — goes out of his way to praise the ring Clemens and his (presumably) tacky Texan designer guy created.
Why? Exclusivity. Derek Jeter just thinks it’s so special that there’s a ring out there whose value isn’t watered down by all the unimportant people who managed to get their grubby little hands on one.
Tedquarters 
Playing to your audience with a little Jeter-bashing on opening day at NYS. I like it.
Really? A little over-the-top Ted. There’s no reason for the players to not have their own way to celebrate the WS.
If it was Clemens’ idea, it has to be wrong.
True, but I really don’t like Roger Clemens.
I have always held my Jeter-hate in a sort of amused fashion, like I really do hate him, but what I actually hate is the veneration that surrounds him. I’ve always allowed for the possibility that he’s not actually evil incarnate apart from the role he plays. Not a likely possibility, but a possibility.
But this is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever read about anyone. His favorite ring is the one the little people didn’t get. Nothing about the design, nothing about the fact that it was a teammate who made it for him. Just – the nothings don’t have one.
People who feel that way – that their specialness holds a direct relationship to the non-specialness of the hordes – have tiny, empty little shriveled souls. Oh, that’s ugly.
But no one in the media would dare call him out for such arrogance. Like when Jeter ran into A-Rod for no reason on a pop up directly to A -Rod and the official scorer gave Jeter the error. When Jeter complained to the official scorer after the game it was merely a footnote to the article about the game. If A-Rod had run into Jeter and then complained to the official scorer about getting the error instead of A-Rod, the backpage story of every NY paper the next day would have been about A-Rod’s selfishness.
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