How the `Bobby Bonilla contract' became a $180,000 auction item
The Bobby Bonilla Contract has lived many lives.
It was at first a simple pact between a player and his team, known only to both parties and the agent who brokered the deal. After Bonilla retired, but before the first $1.2 million payout in 2011, the pact became a symbol of the New York Mets' ineptitude. Once the contract details became public, it became an object lesson in finance — arguably a smart deal for both parties.
Now, the paperwork Bonilla signed 22 years ago is many more things.
As of Saturday, it's one of few athlete contracts possessed by a private party. It is worth $180,000 — the amount one Goldin Auctions bidder paid for the paper contract, a non-fungible token (NFT) of the contract, Zoom calls with Bonilla and agent Dennis Gilbert, a signed baseball, and a game-used bat from Bonilla's personal collection.
The remarkable part of the story is this: all along, the contract was nothing more than a few pieces of paper stored safely in Gilbert's Beverly Hills home. Gilbert owns enough baseball memorabilia to fill a museum. Who knew that one of the most valuable artifacts in his collection was not a collectible, but a document that sat dormant for nearly three decades?
Ken Goldin had an idea. The Goldin Auctions founder estimated in a recent interview with Fox Business that the Bonilla contract package might fetch $25,000 to $100,000.
Darren Rovell, a senior executive producer with The Action Network, had an idea. He estimated the package's worth at $30,000 and placed a bid at one point in the auction process. (Rovell helped bring the contract into the popular discourse by tweeting about Bonilla's wire payout every July 1. Every year on that date from 2011 to 2035, Bonilla receives $1,193,248.20 from the Mets).
With 54 minutes left in the bidding Saturday, the largest bid was $16,000.
Ultimately, everyone should have taken the over.
“In no scenario did I think this would happen,” Joshua Kusnick said.
Kusnick, once a registered player agent, is the founder of The Simple NFT Company, which created the 1-of-1 NFT of Bonilla's contract. Prior to this, the largest baseballrelated NFT sale was a $100,000 Shohei Ohtani NFT that sold in January.
Gilbert believes the fascination with the Bonilla contract stemmed from Bonilla's own celebrity in New York. He was born in the Bronx.
When he was meeting with teams as a free agent, Bonilla visited Angels owners Gene and Jackie Autry at their eponymous museum in Los Angeles, Gilbert said. In Philadelphia, Bonilla hung out with Phillies owner Bill Giles at a country club.
In New York, Gilbert said, “it took us 45 minutes to walk two blocks to our hotel to where we were having dinner with the Mets, because everybody on the street knew who he was.”
Of course, there's also the unique structure of the contract itself. Bonilla was 48 years old and more than 12 years removed from his final game as a Met when he received his first July 1 payout. By then, the “Bonilla Fund” had been growing for 11 years, boosted by an 8% annual interest payout.
Critics contend that
Bonilla would have earned more money from the deal if he had taken the $25 million he would ultimately receive as a lump-sum payout decades ago. But by deferring the money, Bonilla was assured of a future sevenfigure income. That was the key to the deal, Gilbert said.
Growing up in South Los Angeles, Gilbert played baseball with a number of future pros. After his own brief career as a minor leaguer ended, some of his peers went on to enjoy long major league careers. Yet many were destitute soon after their playing careers ended. Later, as an agent, Gilbert was intent on helping Bonilla and all his clients avoid the same fate.
“Tony Gwynn filed bankruptcy,” Gilbert said. “There are a lot of those (cases). You see all the guys who are broke just a few years after they played. This was the mindset that Bobby had. This is what I talked about from the very first day he became a client of mine.”
It has often been reported — incorrectly — that the concept of the Mets' deferred payments to Bonilla was hatched closer to the time he was released in January 2000. Not so. The original contract outlining the structure of the deferrals was executed on April 1, 1994.
Had it been contained in any other contract, that little detail might have been largely lost to history.
Now, remarkably, it's contained in one of the most unique auction items ever.