Ex-Met Bonilla talks gift that’s still giving
Bobby Bonilla isn’t for sale. The former Met, who gets paid $1.19 million by the team each year until 2035, stopped by WFAN’s “Boomer and Carton” where he talked about a variety of topics, including the unusual contract that continues to drive Mets fans crazy.
Boomer Esiason brought up the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme in which the Mets found themselves involved. Boomer believes it was Bonilla who emerged as a winner out of it since he still gets a guaranteed paycheck every year.
Bonilla said the Mets have asked to pay him the remainder of his contract at once, but it doesn’t sound like the former slugger is budging.
“I get a lot of calls for buyouts, not just from the Mets,” Bonilla said.
In 2000, the Mets owed Bonilla $5.9 million for the season but they didn’t want him on the team anymore. Dennis Gilbert, Bonilla’s agent at the time, was able to negotiate a deal with the Mets where Bonilla would defer payment to 2011 and eight percent annual interest be added to that rate, totaling $29.8 million.
At the time of the deal, the Mets were getting hefty returns from their accounts with Madoff. The team believed they’d be able to use the returns from Madoff to pay the deferred contract of Bonilla and still profit, but that’s not what happened.
While Bonilla touched on his contract that irks Mets fans every July 1, he also shed some light on why he and Rickey Henderson decided it was a good idea to play cards during Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS.
When the Mets lost Game 6 to the Braves that year, Henderson and Bonilla made headlines for their clubhouse antics. The two left the dugout after being removed from action by manager Bobby Valentine and headed out of sight.
Bonilla told Boomer and Carton that Henderson, who had been playing left field, was not happy about the decision. To cool off, Henderson suggested the two play cards.
“Rickey says to me ‘Bo, get the deck of cards, let me just relax my mind’ and we had actually played cards all year long,” Bonilla said. “He was so upset, so we can’t say ‘so what’ because you don’t want anything escalating after so I just took care of the problem and let it go.”
The former Met added the two were playing Casino and had the game on. He said no one came into the clubhouse to get them since they were out of the game, even though it looked bad they weren’t in the dugout with their teammates during a critical game.
Bonilla was on the Mets from 19921995. He returned to the team in 1999 when the Dodgers traded him to New York but he was released by the team after one season.