---
title: "Bobby Bonilla Day: why the Mets pay a retired player every July 1"
description: "Every July 1, the New York Mets pay Bobby Bonilla nearly $1.2 million — a man who last played in the majors in 2001. The quirky annual ritual, now marked by fans as 'Bobby Bonilla Day,' traces back to a deferred-money deal that has become one of baseball's most famous financial cautionary tales."
category: "Sports"
category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/sports
author: "Liam Fitzgerald"
published: 2026-07-02T09:14:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-02T09:14:00.000Z
canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/bobby-bonilla-day-why-the-mets-pay-a-retired-player-every-july-1
tags: ["baseball", "mlb", "new-york-mets", "bobby-bonilla", "sports-business"]
---
# Bobby Bonilla Day: why the Mets pay a retired player every July 1

Every July 1, the New York Mets pay Bobby Bonilla nearly $1.2 million — a man who last played in the majors in 2001. The quirky annual ritual, now marked by fans as 'Bobby Bonilla Day,' traces back to a deferred-money deal that has become one of baseball's most famous financial cautionary tales.

Every year on July 1, one retired baseball player gets a reminder of just how well a contract can age. The New York Mets send Bobby Bonilla a check for $1,193,248.20 — and will keep doing so every year until 2035, more than three decades after he last wore the team's uniform. Fans have turned the date into a wry unofficial holiday: "Bobby Bonilla Day."

## The deal behind the day

Bonilla was a genuine star in his prime — a six-time All-Star and three-time Silver Slugger who hit 287 home runs over a 16-year career, and a World Series champion with the Florida Marlins in 1997. He had two spells with the Mets, but by the end of the 2000 season the relationship had soured and the team wanted to move on.

The problem was that the Mets still owed Bonilla about $5.9 million. Rather than pay it out then, the club's management struck a deal: defer the money, with interest accruing at 8 percent a year, and begin paying it in equal annual installments starting in 2011. The result is 25 payments of just under $1.2 million each, running from 2011 through 2035 — a total of nearly $30 million for a sum that began as less than a fifth of that.

## Why the Mets said yes

On its face, the arrangement looked shrewd for the team. By postponing the payout, the Mets kept cash on hand that they believed they could invest for annual returns comfortably above the 8 percent promised to Bonilla. If those investments performed, the club would come out ahead.

That calculation is where the story turned. The Mets' then-owners, the Wilpon family, were reported to have expected strong returns from money invested with Bernie Madoff. When Madoff's operation was exposed in 2008 as an enormous Ponzi scheme, those expected returns evaporated, and the family's finances took heavy losses. The Mets were left honoring a deferred deal without the investment gains that were supposed to make it a bargain.

## A lasting punchline

Deferred money is not unusual in baseball, and in recent years far larger sums have been pushed into the future by other teams and stars. But Bonilla's deal endures as the most famous example, partly because of the neat symbolism of a single, sizable check arriving every year on the same date, long after the player's career ended.

For Bonilla, now in his 60s, the deal has proved a steady and well-timed annuity. For the Mets, "Bobby Bonilla Day" has become an annual moment of self-deprecating humor — and a reminder that in sports, as in finance, the cost of a contract is not always clear on the day it is signed.

## Sources

- [Bobby Bonilla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bonilla)
- [Bobby Bonilla Day: Why the Mets pay him every July 1](https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33255685/bobby-bonilla-day-why-mets-pay-bobby-bonilla-every-july-1)