FanPost

Bobby Bonilla...How not to defer a contract.



On July 1, 2011 a 47 year old Bobby Bonilla will begin collecting a salary of $1.2million for the next twenty five years, funny thing is he hasn't played an inning of baseball in over nine years. Those of you familiar with Bobby Bo remember that he was a pretty decent player, versatile defensively with good power. He was also known as somewhat of a malcontent. Well the Steve Phillips led Mets were desperate enough to get rid of him and his paltry $5.9million contract that they decided to negotiate a contract deferral that will pay an additional $25million in interest.

Hey, I understand that any team would be desperate to get rid of this guy, after all he was found playing cards with teammate and baseball legend Rickey Henderson while his team was losing the deciding game of the '99 NLCS. and earlier that year he got into a verbal war with Bobby Valentine. Wouldn't a smart baseball executive just treat that contract like a band-aid and just rip it off the books?

Anyway, the Cubs have a lot of contracts that they will certainly be eating money on, here's hoping that whoever is GM will not piss away the future with these types of business decisions. What happened with Bonilla is more common than people might think. Bonilla happened to hit paydirt because his agent had taken advantage of one the biggest baseball morons the east coast has ever seen.

BTW, when Bonilla was recently asked about his future wealth he responded with "Oh, that beautiful thing".

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