Before there was a change yesterday, Washington Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo talked to 106.7 the FAN in D.C.’s Sports Junkies this past Wednesday about the plans for what was initially supposed to be a virtual ring ceremony to hand out some of the World Series rings the club earned this past October when they beat the Houston Astros in the Fall Classic to claim the first MLB championship by a D.C.-based team since 1924.
With the start of the season and the planned ring ceremony in Nationals Park on indefinite hold with the 2020 campaign postponed by the coronavirus pandemic, the club made the tough choice to take things online.
“It’s an important day in context of the 2019 season,” Rizzo told the Junkies. “I think it’s an unbelievably important part of the Nationals’ history and I think it’s going to be really nice for a big part of the fan base in the DMV to embrace this thing.”
“So I’m really excited about it,” he added.
“I can’t wait to see our rings and to have them and to wear them around, and it’s going to be something of great pride and accomplishment, and I’m sure it will be very, very emotional for a lot of us.”
A day ahead of the planned ceremony, however, the Nationals announced that after they’d talked to the team, a decision was made to delay the ring ceremony and instead unveil the rings tonight, while waiting to hand them out until the team could once again gather in one place to distribute them.
“When team leaders discussed the plan this week with the players,” the Nationals noted in a press release on the decision, “the players collectively decided they would prefer to receive their rings when the team could be physically reunited. We support that decision.”
So we’ll get to see the rings tonight, when the unveiling is aired on Nationals.com, the MLB Network, MASN, and the Nationals’ Facebook and YouTube channels at 7:00 PM EDT, with a show to follow with MASN’s Dan Kolko and a few players reacting to the rings at 8:00 PM.
That all comes, of course, after Pt. 2 of the club’s World Series documentary, Improbable, airs on MASN and Nationals.com starting at 5:30 PM, so there’s a night full of Nationals to come for the baseball starved among us. Catch up on Part 1 of the film now if you weren’t able to watch last night.
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