Giants planning a ring worthy of a champion

The New York Yankees do nothing on the cheap. After they won the 2009 World Series, they presented every team employee with a championship ring that would have made Deion Sanders blush. Each contained 119 diamonds totaling 3.5 carats, with an array of symbols molded into the gold.

The top featured the interlocking "NY" logo in diamonds. One side read, "World Champions" over a depiction of Yankee Stadium. Highlighting the other side was the familiar top-hat logo set between the recipient's last name and the word "Tradition."

The Yankees set the bar high for the Giants, who for the first time since they moved to San Francisco, have the joyous but challenging task of designing a championship ring.

This is what they all say they play for, their holy grail, and fans surely cannot wait to see the Giants receive their rings before a home game in April.

Staci Slaughter, the Giants' senior vice president for communications, said team officials are about to start the process by visiting with companies that forge rings and cannot yet say what theirs will look like. They have a lot of decisions to make, including:

-- Which symbols and words to stamp into whichever precious metal they choose, to make the rings unique to San Francisco and the Giants.

-- How many and what types of diamonds and stones to use and how much to spend. These rings run from $5,000 to $10,000 each, which is quite a spread.

-- How many models they want to create. Many teams create smaller rings for lower-level staffers than those presented to the players and front-office honchos, the so-called "A" rings. Some design smaller rings to complement the larger ones because the latter are too unwieldy to wear.

Expect extravagance

One thing is certain: The final Giants "A" ring will be extravagant enough to fulfill the players' Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

"Definitely over the last several years, the rings have had more of a bling factor," said Donald Percenti, chairman of Texas-based American Achievement Corp., which creates championship rings under the Balfour name and produced last year's for New York.

"The last two rings I was involved with, the Boston Celtics' ring and the Yankees' ring, in terms of size and design, they were pretty elegant even though they're large rings," Percenti said. "The Yankees certainly wanted a ring that had the integrity and fit well with the Yankee tradition, and I think they got that."