Bobby Bonniera Day: He has not played in MLB in over 20 years. One team is paying him $1.2 million a year until 2035

Date:



CNN

He hasn’t picked up professional baseball gloves in 24 years, but he’s still picking up his pay.

For Mets fans in New York, that means it’s Bobby Bonniera’s Day.

The former slugger retired with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2001, but for over a decade he has collected almost $1.2 million checks from the Mets each year.

The deal is part of a contract negotiated by Bonilla’s agent Dennis Gilbert, who will pay $1,193,248.20 per year until 2035.

How could Gilbert secure such a sweet deal for his client? They can both thank dishonorable investor Bernie Madoff and former Mets owner Fred Wilpon.

The Mets wanted to break up with Bonilla in 1999, but he left $6 million left on the contract. Wilpon believed he was making a great return on his investment through Madoff, but the Mets owner turns out to be the victim of Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme.

Instead of paying Bonilla in full, Wilpon chose to postpone the payment, allowing the money to be unconsciously invested in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Bonilla’s agent Gilbert negotiated with the team to postpone payments until 2011, with an annual interest rate of 8%.

Madoff was the mastermind of the most infamous Ponzi project in history. The Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud that uses more recent investors to pay profits to previous investors, and will lead you to believe that the investment is part of a successful company.

Madoff, who passed away in 2021, served in 150 years in prison on a multi-billion-dollar scheme.

In total, Bonilla will have a payday of $29.8 million due to Wilpon’s failure.

In MLB, players are not uncommon to be paid for long periods of time, and contracts often postpone money.

Most notably, after the Los Angeles Dodgers signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with Japanese two-way star Shohei ohtani in 2023, they decided to postpone $68 million of their average $70 million salary each year.

This means that Otani will be paid $2 million a year than the contract, and a postponement (total of $680 million) will begin in 2034.

The Dodgers have made recent payments a common theme, and they do so when they signed Blake Snell and Tommy Edman.

However, the idea has long been around since the 1960s when accountant Ralph Dolgoff first became popular in the 1960s by the “Dolgoff Project,” in which the American Basketball Association (ABA) helped teams compete with the NBA by allowing teams to provide payments for multiple years in an attempt to attract players with long-term safety appeal.

So, Bonilla may be one of the most famous beneficiaries of the deferred payment scheme, but he is not the first and undoubtedly the last.

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