Buster Posey could win 4th ring with Giants

There’s so much at stake in this historic NLDS between the Giants and Dodgers, and here’s another angle to consider: Buster Posey and the Giants have to get through Los Angeles for the wide receiver to win his Fourth ring with the club.

If four rings ring a lot, especially with a team, that’s because it is. Let’s explain ourselves.

Let’s get rid of that fact early on: there are a lot of players with four or more rings with the Yankees. As in, 62 players, which doesn’t seem so far-fetched when you remember that the franchise has won 27 titles, by far the most of any team.

And one more thing to keep in mind: we’re talking about rings, not official World Series winner designations. What is the difference? To be officially credited with victory in statistical history, a player must have participated in a World Series match for the winning team. But we’re talking about rings here under the idea that usually a player who’s even appeared in a regular season game for the team gets one. If we were just talking about the official Yankees, four-time World Series winners, that number of 62 would be smaller – but that wouldn’t reflect those precious possessions in former players’ trophy cases, either.

With all of that defined, we can answer the question: How rare would it be for Posey to do this with the Giants? Since the playoffs extended into the dawn of the Divisional era in 1969, no non-Yankee has won four rings with the same team.

Potential elite company in the Netherlands

In fact, there are only three NHL players to do it – and they’re all Dodgers: Jim Gilliam, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Podres. Gilliam played for the Dodgers in 1955, ’59, ’63 and ’65 as the team won titles, appearing in the Fall Four Classics. Koufax pitched in the ’59, ’63 and ’65 World Series, and appeared for the club in the regular season in 1955, thus falling into the category mentioned above. Podres pitched in the ’55, ’59, and ’63 series, and he appeared in the regular season in 1965.

That’s it. They are the only NL players with no less than four World Series rings with a single franchise. But rival Giants’ Posey could join them… although the first step is to beat the Dodgers this round. And why the emphasis on these four rings being all with the same team? Because it’s a testament to the enduring nature of a player’s tenure with this club.

So what if we extended it to AL, throughout 1903 World Series history, without the Yankees? This is where it gets really fun. If we look for players, beyond those rated so far, to be on a World Series winning team’s regular season roster at least four times with the same franchise, we get three more names. They are Heinie Wagner and Harry Hooper (1912, ’15 -’16, ’18) with the Red Sox and Eddie Collins with the A (1910-11, ’13, ’17).

But there is a twist here. The first World Series winning team to receive rings was the 1922 Giants. And the Wagner, Hooper, and Collins seasons all took place before that. So technically they haven’t won at least four rings with the same team, since there were no rings. But in all fairness, each played at least on the regular season roster of a four-season World Series winning team with the same club, so we’ll be counting them. We are nothing but generous here.

This is the company Posey is looking to join with the Giants in October. Three Dodgers, three players from before the live ball era (1920) and a ton of Yankees. Quite the list.