Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Just When I Thought You Couldn't Get Any Dumber, You Go and Do Something Like This . . .

I am a Mets fan.

Note the present tense; yes, I'm still a fan despite the disemboweling Mets Township took this year at the hands of this once-proud franchise. Well, at least once-feisty. Now there are just thousand-yard-stares abound in both the organization and its fan base. By late August we all became a bunch of R. P. McMurphys, lumbering along, hoping and praying someone would appear to Big Chief the Mets, the 2009 season, and our rapidly diminishing attention to baseball.

Terrible. But, as I've been forced to point out for waaaaay too long, these times are the proving grounds for people to earn their stripes as fans. Dues-paying time, and a fine opportunity to shed worthless bandwagoners who've by now ordered, received, and donned their 2009 World Champions Yankees caps and their "27" T-shirts. We won't be leaving the back porch light on for you folks, so let's go ahead and have your mail forwarded to the Bronx. Good riddance.

I'm still a fan. The baseball blog we began in earnest in 2003 -- and will be giving a Viking funeral in a couple of weeks -- didn't illustrate that fact very well this season, but I think my contribution to the 1,637 posts over the years at Misery Loves Company speak to it. I've poured and will continue to pour a good deal of time, money, effort, interest, and emotion into the New York Mets. For better or for worse.

But you know what? I'm not such an avid Mets fan that this amusing little nugget didn't slip through my radar. (Amusing like a 2x4 to the eye socket.)

Looking ahead a year or so, here's what the the Mets' 2011 payroll currently looks like:
New York Mets 2011 Payroll
Luis Castillo: $6,250,000
David Wright: $14,250,000
Jose B. Reyes: club option @ $11,000,000 or $500,000 buyout
Carlos Beltran: $18,500,000
Johan Santana: $22,500,000
Oliver Perez: $12,000,000
Francisco Rodriguez: $11,167,000
Bobby Parnell: $400,000
Omir Santos: $400,000
Alex Cora: a vesting option
Daniel Murphy: $400,000
Bobby Bonilla: $1,193,248.20
Yeah.

That's right.

The Mets will pay Bobby Bo $1.19M in 2011. And 2012. And 2013. And 2014. And 2015. And it goes on until 2035.

What I'd either forgotten or never knew was that rather than pay this worthless, two-time loser $5.9 million to go away in 2000, the Mets agreed to pay him $1.19M every year from 2011 to 2035. That's a total of $29,831,205. Seems stupid, right?

Here's where it gets doubly delicious. Yes, the Mets seem to be rewarding Bonilla for being an enormous prick. (Not having one, however, as the NY rumor mill will tell you.) Giving him close to 30 mill instead of 6. And by dispensing it like allowance, it keeps him from being the moron that he is and blowing it all in one fell trip to A.C. -- all highly annoying.

But . . . taking into account the interest over 10-35 years, and dollars in 2000 versus dollars in 2035, it's actually a much better deal for the Mets. Here's how fellow Mets blogger (I still have my membership card, dammit) Eli from Brooklyn explained it when people thought it was a misprint:
It is actually correct, and a horrible deal... for Bonilla. Ahh, the power of compounded interest. The way it works, the Mets set aside $6 million in 2000 @ a rate of 12% per year. They are not allowed to withdraw any funds until year 11, in which they can withdraw $1,200,000 per year for 25 years. After the 25 years, and after paying off Bonilla, the Mets will have... drum roll please... $138 million. So they took the $6 million he was supposed to receive and invested it themselves and made $132 million for themselves on it. They also have a similar deal with Bret Saberhagen.
Wow. I'm stunned -- the Mets were actually shrewd with their money and didn't find themselves on the ass end of a big-money deal. Bonilla gets his money, and more of it, but the Mets make a lot of cash off sending him to the scrap heap. (As it turned out, the "scrap heap" was Atlanta, which makes sense to me.)

But . . . wait . . . there's more.
Now here comes the problem with this deal and others. Bernie Madoff is the one that was guaranteeing them the 12%. So the Mets are now going to be paying the players out of their pockets, with new 2011 dollars, not 2000 compounded dollars, and on top of that, never receiving the $138 million lump sum. Much of the speculated $700 million the Mets lost was not what they lost out of pocket, but what was supposed to be there after this great compounded rate.
Honestly. This organization can't win for losing, and it feels like we take just as many lumps. They get hoodwinked by this scheming pettifogger for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the end result is that the team we watch will be worse for it and . . . AND . . . Bobby Bonilla's grimace-inducing name will not come off the books of The New York Metropolitans Baseball Team until I am 65 years old. It's just . . . [labored groan].

Apparently this story made its way around the Township in August / September this year, but of course I wasn't privy to it, what with my inadvertent, self-imposed Mets blackout. So most fans got this punt in the groin amid the flurry of bad news that kept coming during the season. I, of course, get it now . . . when I had just put the ugliness of '09 to bed and commenced the delusional high hopes for the future.

I'm still a fan. Serenity now, I'm still a fan. Serenity now, I'm still a fan . . .

Oh, and Steve Phillips, you douchebuckle, I hope you get what's coming to you.

32 comments:

zman said...

Hilarious. As I read along I wondered to myself "where the hell are they getting 12% a year?" Only the Metropolitans could screw themselves so soundly and inadvertantly.

Marls said...

Thanks Whit. Real uplifting stuff.

If anybody needs me, I will be in the garage with the car running.

Jerry said...

Chris Coste and Alex Cora will save the day. Why the Mets can't get 22 years olds that suck instead of 39 year olds that suck continues to elude me.

TR said...

Don't worry. The Mets will panic and overpay for Matt Holliday. Or Vonnie Holliday. At least you've got David Wright and his 12 HRs and 63 RBIs locked up in that massive pitcher's park.

What's that you say? The park is good for triples hitters? Oh, well then I take back my thoughts that the park has castrated the team's best hitter. I didn't know it would boost Reyes' triples total, assuming his porcelain hamstrings heal any time soon.

TR said...

Looks like I confused my David Wright stats with my Daniel Murphy stats. Wright was actually a 10/72 guy last year, along with 140 Ks. Egads.

The fact that Wright and Murphy's stats were on top of each other is sad enough for Mets fans.

Whitney said...

TR, do you have some sort of point beyond "the Mets suck"?

Mark said...

You people are making it increasingly hard to read G:TB on my iPhone in the can with these long posts.

TR said...

My points are that the Mets suck and David Wright needs to re-up on his HGH orders.

rob said...

according to the sportsbog, darren sharper has more yards in interception returns this season than malcolm kelly, devin thomas, and fred davis have in their careers. combined.

redskinesque!

zman said...

How often do WR and TE get INT yards though?

Whitney said...

A number of you know our friend Cliff from fraternity days or softball games. He was once a stellar athlete, the kind of guy who could play a sport for the first time and be adept at it. Now he's old and somewhat portly, which goes without saying (thank, Mark), but he's still a great golfer, horseshoe pitcher, and whatever else we fat, old guys play.

He's also always been a sports fan. Skins, Caps, Bullets, O's, now Nats, Tribe, whatever. Season ticket holder in each of those teams at some point. Watches way too much sports on TV. Knows his stuff.

So, Cliff has been in our Fantasy Football league since it began. We have 12 dudes in a pretty basic-rules league that hasn't changed much since we threw it together in 1994. 12 teams, 6 make the playoffs every year.

Cliff's team lost this week to eliminate him from playoff contention. For the 16th time in 16 years. He has never made the playoffs. Not once. Rob's won the league a few times, I have twice -- hell, even our friend Johnny Grant won it once, and he doesn't know squat. Cliffy's never made it to the postseason at all.

It's uncanny, and for those of you who will see him next year at the Fishing Trip, make mention of it. He loves it.

zman said...

He should draft more Redskins.

Shlara said...

Whit, I can't believe you knocked the Tribe post off the top of the page with the Mets...

rob said...

much love to the z-man for pointing out my redskinesque sentence construction.

zman said...

If you blogged for a living, rob, I'd characterize that sentence as jamarcusian. But you don't, so it isn't. It's merely redskineque.

G.W. Bush: jamarcusian?
B.H. Obama: carteresque?

zman said...

Or redskinesque. Spelling and typing aren't my forte.

Mark said...

Zoltan beat me to it but I was definitely ready to call Rob out too. Not a surprise I guess. The real surprise would have been everybody just letting that statement be. We may not be original but we are definitely predictable.

Marls said...

Thanks TR.

Your Yankee fan nut punches would be much more annoying if I did not know that you were a Jet/Islander/Knick fan.

Mark said...

Alright, there's something I have to say:

I was hesitant to say this at first because I do not know Dan and don't want to come off like a total dick (I know, too late). Dan's seemed conflicted on this whole Tiger Woods thing from the start. First he questions what kind of "shape" Tiger was in at 2:30 am on Thanksgiving based on the fact that Tiger's a man and Dan's a man and Dan wasn't in very good shape at that same time.

Then, he seemed to rebut Rob's thoughts on Tiger's problems/crash stemming from a domestic violence situation that was the result of infidelity. His only real reasons for this were (a) that Tiger "is smarter than that"...which seems pretty presumptuous. (Kind of like saying some of the same things about Jordan during the late 80s when we were still all being led to believe he was squeaky clean.) Tiger is plenty smart, but make no mistake, he's a very rich man with a ton of advisers and handlers who carefully craft every aspect of his image. I'm sure he's smart but I'm not willing to say he's incapable of lousy and/or impulsive judgement (which is essentially what Dan was saying) and then Dan followed that up (b) by saying that both he and Tiger had 2 children under the age of 4 and he can't imagine doing the things that Tiger's reported to have done (Dan, there are thousands of things Tiger's done that you, or I, couldn't even begin to comprehend or imagine). Like I said, some pretty flimsy logic there. So, now that we are being told that Tiger sent over 300 text messages to some other supposed lover, do you still have a hard time believing that Tiger could do such things Dan?

The lesson here, besides don't jump to conclusions (which I'm clearly eschewing) is that no matter how rich or successful somebody is they are still human, just like the rest of us, and still very much susceptible to the same lapses in judgment and weaknesses toward vices that we all are.

One last thing: EVERY male professional athlete cheats on their wife. I always believed this, even before I worked in sports. I will go to my grave believing this as one of life's few truths after that time working in sports.

Feel free to tell me to fuck off, Dan. Just thought I'd finally contribute my two cents to the Tiger convo, as I know you all were dying to hear my opinion.

Whitney said...

Cal Ripken didn't. Kevin Costner did with his wife, but Cal didn't.

And Russ Francis never fooled around with other women. But I guess doing it with other men constitutes cheating as well.

Whitney said...

And Shlara, I think the amount of time the Tribe post spent atop G:TB was commensurate with the amount of time the Tribe will spend in the Top 100.

What TR should have done instead of merely offer a link was take a screen shot of it and post that. Weeks from now, nobody will believe it otherwise.

zman said...

The Jets brought Joe Girardi in to teach Sanchez how to slide?

Whitney said...

Rickey Henderson was their second choice, but Girardi was always known for his deft moves on the 'paths.

rob said...

the acc is 10-0 in the acc/big 10 challenge. bases on early returns, the streak may end this year.

T.J. said...

Well Mark, it appears your boy Carlos will not be playing Saturday.

T.J. said...

The Knicks are beating the Suns by 30 right now? Can that be correct?

Mark said...

Did you REALLY think he was playing Saturday? Give Urban at least a little credit.

Never a chance of Dunlap playing. Not with a DUI and certainly not the kind of DUI it was.

rob said...

fuck, but i hate carolina

Greg said...

I heard that some Alabama booster spiked carlos's drink.

d-train said...

mark - why would i tell you to f'off, especially with what has unfolded over the last 24 or so hours (which i haven't been entirely caught up on) wanted to post some stuff yesterday but have been wrapped up, as will be the case for most of today.
listen, much of what i said about tiger comes down, or came down rather a little blind faith, a fair share na"golf biz", no i don't sell f'ing footjoys or titleist golf clubs. will leave it at that. much of what i posted the other day definitely came down to too much faith in the guy, naivety on my part, and limited knowledge of tiger.
you probably don't know this and it may be irrelevant to you, but am in the golf biz and have been for 15 years. by i live in p.v beach, fl, home of pga tour hq's. have been involved in about a dozen events at isleworth, some w/tiger. on a weekly basis i see furyk at the Y or Singh at starbuck's? does that mean anything? not really. do i know them? no, i don't. but i know plenty that do, and in a social sense, and more than a few that know tiger, and not tiger in a golf tournament, but "off the course" tiger.
i'll leave it at that, but no mark, i don't take offense. as far as the shape he was in at 2:30, have heard the rumor that he had in fact had been drinking, much like me that evening.
and lastly, with the kids statement, you know that was blind faith - he's still "new" in daddy hood for the most part. in my opinion, it makes making a decision like that a whole different ballgame, even if no one will ever find out about it.
it certainly looks as if i put way too much faith in the guy.

d-train said...

not sure what happened there...

1st sentence, 2nd paragraph should read, "...came down to blind faith, naivete on my part, and limited knowledge of tiger"

also just say that have been in the golf business for 15 years...

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