Mister Consistency

How to get paid. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Former Major League Baseball player Bobby Bonilla turned 57 earlier this year. I hope he had a nice time.

But I suspect there’s another day each year he might celebrate even more heartily than his birthday.

That would be July 1, which is the day every year on which the New York Mets give Bonilla a check for $1,193,248.20 (or maybe a wire transfer; it’s 2021, after all), despite the fact that he hasn’t played for them since 1999.

Here’s the story.

Bonilla played for eight teams in his 16 years in the major leagues. He went to the All Star Game six times, and won the World Series with the Florida Marlins in 1997.

It’s his time with the Marlins and the Mets that concerns us here.

• First, Florida, because that’s the team with which he signed a $23 million contract in 1996.

• Next, New York, because that’s the team he was later traded to, and which was on the hook for the final year of his salary—$5.9 million for the 2000 season—despite the fact that his skills had deteriorated by then, and there wa…