Bobby Bonilla and the True Story Behind Baseball’s Most Notorious Contract
Thanks to an agreement with the old owners, the former outfielder still gets a big payday every summer. The arrangement helped the Mets get to the World Series. But a new book says that no matter how effective the move was, July 1 will always be an ironic holiday for fans. It’ll always be Bobby Bonilla Day.
An oft-forgotten fact about the Bobby Bonilla era with the New York Mets is that there were actually two Bobby Bonilla eras. The first one began in December 1991, when Bonilla, then 28 and a four-time All-Star with the Pittsburgh Pirates, signed a five-year, $29 million contract—Major League Baseball’s most lucrative ever up to that point—to move to Queens and anchor the Mets offense.
The Bobby Bo who arrived in New York fresh off back-to-back National League East titles and back-to-back top-three MVP finishes was sunny and smiley and beloved—a big teddy bear, here to rescue the team that he and his surly co-star, Barry Bonds, had been brutally dismantling. Bonilla seemed like the perfect antidote to the PTSD from the Mets’ post-1986 World Series decline. Instead he became the face of what Mets beat writer Bob Klapisch dubbed “the worst team money could buy”: the 1993 Mets, 59-103, a record that doesn’t come close to capturing how disgraceful they were in the flesh. Eighteen months later he was gone in a trade to Baltimore. And good riddance, too. Good riddance all around.