It was snowing softly outside Red Sox principal owner John Henry’s house in Brookline, Mass., on Christmas Eve when the ownership group held a meeting to sign off on one its most expensive acquisitions of the offseason: the World Series championship rings.
Miran Armutlu, master jeweler and vice president of product development and engineering at Jostens, a major North American jewelry manufacturer, had flown in from Montreal with the final drafts for the championship rings. The Red Sox had partnered with Jostens for each of their previous three rings this century, so working with Armutlu was an obvious choice. The Red Sox ownership group of John and Linda Henry, chairman Tom Werner, Fenway Sports Group president Mike Gordon and Red Sox president Sam Kennedy spearheaded the design process from the Red Sox side.
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The complexity of the rings, a design with so many intricate details, created a tight timetable in order to be ready for Opening Day. So there was no other choice but to have the Christmas Eve meeting; production on the rings began Dec. 26.
“We are probably Jostens’ most high-maintenance client,” Kennedy said. “And that is because John and Linda Henry and Tom Werner are extremely passionate about the rings — the design, how they look — and Mike Gordon as well.
“They see it as sort of their ‘thank you’ to the players and something that’s going to last forever. So they really take it personally,” he said.
The fact that Armutlu and Jostens have had a hand in the design of every Red Sox championship ring since 2004 made the task of creating the 2018 version equal parts familiar and challenging.
“It’s a fresh start every time,” Armutlu said. “So you’re always back to a blank piece of paper and say, ‘OK, here’s our canvas; how do we plan it?’ You don’t want the rings to look alike, especially this one. I think John wanted to set a new standard, and I believe he did that. When the rings come out, everybody’s going to say, ‘Wow, this is the ring to follow.’”
The planning process started the day of the Red Sox World Series parade with the first step of collecting ring sizes for each player. About three weeks later, Armutlu met with the Henrys, Gordon and Werner to begin evaluating initial drafts and discussing ideas in greater detail.
From mid-November until Dec. 24, Armutlu showed the Red Sox owners about 13 different samples with different stone combinations, sizes, cuts and type fonts.
“The biggest thing in the first couple of meetings is really to get an idea of what’s the size, what’s the shape they’re looking for,” Armutlu said. “That’s where it all starts, that’s the framework where you begin from. Initially, we had our own ideas of shape and size and, obviously, came with a couple of ideas, but as always, inevitably, those first ideas always get thrown out the door and you start all over again. Our process of approval in this case, with this ring, I wanted to move as fast as possible because I knew it involved some very, very intricate stone cutting, genuine stones. So we were literally there (in Boston) on a weekly basis, with the culmination, believe it or not, on Christmas Eve of getting the final signoff.”
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While ownership focused on what the ring would look like, most of the grunt work from the Red Sox side was coordinated by John Henry’s special assistant, Sylvia Moon. Not only do players and coaches receive rings, but hundreds of people within the organization do, too. Names and rings sizes for those employees were just the easy details she had to collect and organize to pass along to Jostens.
As Red Sox owners and Armutlu came closer to their perfect version of the rings, they expanded the inner circle ever so slightly to include Kennedy, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski and manager Alex Cora. Outside of that group and Armutlu’s team working on the rings, no else knows what the rings look like.
“I have no idea. No one knows,” utilityman Brock Holt said. “I think only John Henry and Linda were a part of the thing. I think AC’s seen a picture, but he hasn’t seen the actual ring. So none of us have seen it. We don’t know what it looks like. I think everyone is excited to get home and finally see what it looks like.”
Over the past 10 years, Jostens has manufactured over 95 percent of all professional championship rings in North America. Armutlu, who’s been in the business for over 35 years, estimated that he has worked on 97 or 98 ring programs as the lead designer.
“They trust a little bit of our direction, as to which way the industry is going and what’s happened the last two or three years (and) since they won (in 2013),” Armutlu said. “Those are the things that really dictate which way you’re going, but at the end of the day, it’s the ownership that said, ‘That’s the ring we want.’”
The basics of every ring are the same, but that’s about it. Each ring is customized and personalized. Each player’s ring includes their name and number, as well as nicknames and even pictures, engraved on the sides. Each ring will have the player’s tenure with the team and the number of World Series trophies they’ve won.
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“We have so many stones that need to be custom-cut that each one has to be set by hand individually, one by one. There (are) over 185 stones on the ring. How long did it take? It took from Dec. 26 until three hours ago to get the whole project complete,” Armutlu said by phone on April 3.
“Just shipped everything today,” he said with finality.
Over the three-month-plus process of assembling the rings, Armutlu estimated about 50 people from his team work on each ring.
Every ring needs to have its own die cut. For the over 700 rings made (neither the Red Sox nor Jostens would provide an exact number of rings or their cost), just cutting the dies takes about a month to complete.
“Obviously, you’re not standing still for a month,” Armutlu said. “So the minute the first 20 or 30 dies are done, you’re starting the process of making the ring. And so in this case, we have to coordinate with our partners in Thailand, who cut the custom-cut stones for us; then we have to coordinate with our partners in Germany, who cut some other stones for us. So the first two or three weeks is really, more than anything, coordination.”
The 2018 Red Sox ring is one of the most complex ring programs on which Armutlu has ever worked. None of the parties involved would discuss the cost of the rings, but the Chicago Cubs’ 2016 rings, also made by Jostens, cost a reported $70,000 apiece — and they were not as complex or intricate as these Red Sox rings.
Armutlu will be at Fenway for the ring ceremony and is looking forward to seeing months of work on display.
“We put our hearts and souls into delivering this, and the best part of all that is when the player puts it on his finger and realizes, ‘Oh, my god — I’m a world champion,’” Armutlu said. “When you can capture that moment, it’s worth a million bucks. It’s just an amazing moment.”
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Holt didn’t hide his anticipation, either.
“Maybe a little bit more exciting than Christmas morning,” he said. “I don’t know who’s the first person that’s going to get called out to get to see it. We’re all looking forward to seeing what they came up with.”
(Photo of 2013 Red Sox ring: Tom Szczerbowski / Getty Images)
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