Steve Phillips doesn’t quite have 700 million reasons to be thankful for Shohei Ohtani, but in some regards the blockbuster contract is a load off his back.
Mets fans are long past the point of growing fatigued with jokes about the sum of money the team owes Bobby Bonilla every July 1, and Phillips, the former general manager who signed the ex-slugger to a deal with decades of deferred money, is clearly also sick of hearing about it.
With the news that Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers has much of the money coming in the form of deferred payments, which serves to ease the team’s cash flow and luxury tax obligations, Phillips declared himself vindicated for the Bonilla deal.
“I want to clarify reports that the @Dodgers consulted with me before giving all of the deferred comp to Shohei Ohtani. They did not,” Phillips tweeted in a tongue-in-cheek tone.
“But I am sure glad they did it, because it takes me off the hook for Bobby Bonilla. July 1, 2024 just got way better for me.”
The Mets released Bonilla in 1999, but instead of paying him the $5.9 million owed upfront, they struck a deal to defer the compensation, at eight percent interest.
Thus, Bonilla has received an annual payment of $1.2 million, and will continue to do so until 2035.
The Wilpon family, who owned the Mets at the time, believed this to be a slam-dunk deal as they were booking double-digit percentage returns on investment with Bernie Madoff.
However, as you likely already know, Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, and the Wilpons ultimately reached a settlement to pay back $162 million in “gains” they’d received from the relationship.
“I know Bobby is happy about it, but we don’t talk about it much,” Bonilla’s ex-agent, Dennis Gilbert, told USA Today in 2018. “It’s just unfortunate [the Wilpons] got hoodwinked in the Madoff deal. Otherwise, it would have been a win-win for both sides.”
While one can understand why Phillips and the Mets made the deal with Bonilla that they did at the time, the structure of the deferrals do not appear to be the same flow as with Ohtani.
Ohtani is receiving a total of $700 million, which means that he is effectively giving the Dodgers an interest-free loan, whereas the Mets had to pay out the interest to Bonilla.
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