BOBBY BO and the BRAIN TRUST

Thanks to a deal with the old owners, the former outfielder still gets a $1 million check every summer. The arrangement helped the Mets get to the World Series. But a new book says no matter how effective the move was, July 1 will always be an ironic holiday for fans. It’ll always be Bobby Bonilla Day

- Devin Gordon

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 fourtime 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 topthree 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.

So naturally, three years later, in November 1998, the Mets reacquired Bonilla in a trade with the Florida Marlins. The circumstances behind the holiday that Mets fans have come to know as Bobby Bonilla Day transpired at the end of Bonilla’s second stint in New York. Which is to say, the first Bobby Bonilla era was such a generational failure that the Mets refused to rest until they had topped it.