Shohei Ohtani, left, deferred most of the money in his $700-million deal with the Dodgers. Bobby Bonilla’s deferred contracts with the Mets and Orioles earn him $1,693,248.20 annually. The Dodgers, in fact, have made Bonilla’s yearly deferred income look like chump change. The net present value of Ohtani’s $700-million contract is only $437.5 million, and only $46 million currently counts …
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 …
