Bobby Bonilla is still getting paid by the New York Mets. The deferred deal has already sent him $19.1 million since 2011, and the club still owes $10.7 million in yearly $1.19 million installments through 2035.
That leaves one of baseball’s strangest contract obligations running long after Bonilla last played for the Mets in 1999. The money keeps arriving on the same schedule, and the remaining total is large enough to keep the deal from fading into a punch line.
New York Mets keep paying
The Mets’ annual payment is fixed at $1.19 million, and the contract runs through 2035. On paper, that makes the obligation easy to track. In practice, it means the club remains tied to a player whose last game for the team came more than two decades earlier.
Bonilla’s name became shorthand for deferred money, but the contract sits on a firmer base than the joke usually suggests. The source notes that he was a very good ballplayer before the final payday was pushed back, and that part of the story matters because it explains why the Mets were willing to make such a large commitment in the first place.
Bobby Bonilla before the payday
Before the deferred agreement became the thing most people remember, Bonilla’s path was not a straight one. He went undrafted after finishing high school in the Bronx, spent a semester at the New York Institute of Technology pursuing his interest in computers, and later drew the attention of a Pirates scout, Syd Thrift, after playing at a baseball camp in Europe.
His route kept bending. In 1985, he broke one of his legs during spring training and was acquired by the White Sox in the Rule 5 draft. A year later, he was traded at midseason back to the Pirates organization and joined its big-league starting lineup.
Winter of 1991-92 deal
From 1988 to 1991, Bonilla ranked 17th among position players in baseball by FanGraphs’ wins above replacement metric. He also posted MLB’s 11th-best slugging percentage, 13th-best weighted runs created plus, and eighth-most batting runs above average during that span.
That production set up the winter of 1991-92, when the Mets offered him a five-year, $29 million deal and made him the highest-paid player in baseball at the time. After he signed, Al Harazin said, “I’m sure I’m going to get flak for the deal.”
Now the obligation is down to the final stretch, but it is still real money, not nostalgia. The Mets will keep cutting the same check each year through 2035, and Bonilla will keep collecting on a contract that began as a premium baseball agreement and ended as one of the clearest examples of how long a deferred deal can linger.
