Danny Abriano, SNY.tv | Twitter |

It's Bobby Bonilla day for the Mets, which many use as an excuse to lazily bash the team for something they falsely think is a comical anomaly. The truth, though, is that the #LOLMets narrative as it pertains to Bonilla is a garbage narrative.

There are plenty of things to rightfully bash the Mets about, but the Bonilla deal isn't one of them.

Bonilla, who the Mets bought out in 2000 while deferring annual $1.19 million payments from 2011 through 2035, is just one of many players in baseball whose teams are or will be paying large sums of money well after their playing careers are over.

Michael Mayer's tremendous research on this shed light on 25 other deferments throughout baseball, which includes:

The Braves paying Bruce Sutter $1.12 million per year through 2021. He last played for the team in 1988.
The Reds paying Ken Griffey Jr. $3.59 million per year from 2009 through 2024
The Orioles paying Chris Davis, who was arguably given the worst contract in baseball history, $3.5 million annually from 2023 through 2032 and $1.4 million annually from 2033 through 2037
The Nationals on the hook to pay Stephen Strasburg $10 million per year from 2024 through 2030
The Cardinals paying Matt Holliday $1.4 million every year from 2020 through 2029

Aside from deferments being a normal business practice in baseball, there's also the fact that the Bonilla contract being deferred freed up money for the Mets to trade for Mike Hampton, as Eric Malinowski noted for Buzzfeed in 2013.

Hampton led the Mets to the 2000 World Series and then signed with the Rockies that offseason because of their amazing school system. The compensation pick the Mets got for Hampton turned in to David Wright.

Popular in the Community