Happy Bobby Bonilla Day!

If you're a baseball fan, you can't help but giggle when it's July 1st. That's the day when several major league baseball teams make annual deferred payments on large contracts that ended prematurely.

The most notorious of those terminated contracts was the one Bobby Bonilla signed as a free agent with the New York Mets. Not long after signing his deal the superstar began showing his age, and the Mets bought out his contract in January 2000.

Normally a team will agree to pay a portion of the remaining contract as a lump sum to settle matters, but this is the Mess -- I mean, Mets -- we're talking about here. They handled things quite differently twenty-four years ago.

The team invested the remaining $5.9 million owed to Bonilla into an annuity that promised double digit returns. Based on the assumption they would make a lot of money off this investment, the Mets reached an agreement with Bonilla to defer the rest of his salary until 2011. On July 1st of that year, they would make the first of twenty-five annual payments that factored in 8% interest -- just over $1.19 million -- to Bonilla.

Of course the annuity never had a chance in hell to pan out when you consider the financial advisor that set up the account was the one and only Bernie Madoff. That's what makes this tale comical, and with the passage of time even the current owner of the Mets considers July 1st a holiday.

On that note, Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, y'all!