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Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr
Happy Bobby Bonilla day.
I had no idea Bonilla also gets half a mil from the O's til 2029.
Why doesn't every ballplayer hire Bonilla's agent?
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I’m pretty sure this arrangement was cheaper for the Mets and Orioles as well. Just put a bunch of money into a mutual fund - the amount you might have paid Bobby Bo for a normal contract, for example - and just pay him with the profits. It clouds the water when the Mets dump their money into a Ponzi scheme but that’s not an issue with the setup, it’s an issue with them investing poorly.
Terry Pluto’s collection of oral histories about the ABA, Loose Balls, indicates players were offered these kinds of deals pretty regularly for this exact reason: they looked gaudy and massive but were actually cheaper than paying out all at once.
https://www.jewsinsports.org/basketball_ID_310.html
The USFL handed out a number of these sorts of deals, too, most notably if memory serves to Steve Young and Jim Kelly (in their cases, they wound up not even having to honor like 28 of the 30 year contracts because they folded). I realize that the narrative is “lol that’s a dumb deal”… and that’s right, just kind of dumb for Bobby Bonilla to accept it.