Every July 1st, one retired baseball player wakes up richer than some of the sport’s current stars — and he last swung a bat for the New York Mets back in 1999.
That player is Bobby Bonilla, and Wednesday marks another edition of the unofficial holiday that carries his name. On July 1st, 2026, the Mets sent the 63-year-old a check for $1,193,248.20, exactly as they have every summer since 2011.
They will keep doing it until 2035, when Bonilla turns 72. He hasn’t appeared in a Major League game since 2001, yet his annual payday is still one of the strangest fixtures on baseball’s calendar — and the reason behind it is stranger than the number itself.
Why the New York Mets still pay Bobby Bonilla
The short version: the Mets made a bet, and the bet went badly.
In 2000, the club wanted to move on from Bonilla and still owed him $5.9 million. Rather than pay it up front, the Mets agreed to defer the money — nearly $1.2 million a year for 25 years, starting in 2011, with 8% interest built in.
On its own, that was fairly ordinary financial planning. The problem was what the Mets intended to do with the cash in the meantime.
According to ESPN, then-owner Fred Wilpon had money invested with Bernie Madoff, whose accounts promised double-digit returns.
The plan was simple — pay Bonilla 8%, earn more than that through Madoff, and keep the difference. Then Madoff’s operation was exposed as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and the projected profit disappeared.
By the time the deal ends, it will have paid Bonilla close to $30 million.
Deferred contracts are no longer unusual, either. The Los Angeles Dodgers have leaned on the structure hard, most notably with Shohei Ohtani, who agreed to defer $680 million of his $700 million deal and won’t start collecting the bulk of it until 2034.
For the Mets, though, the joke has stuck. Under current owner Steve Cohen, the club has embraced the day rather than hide from it — a rare case of a team turning an embarrassing mistake into an annual celebration.
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