The 2000s had dawned and Y2K's colossal failure to take down the world's infrastructure meant that civilization was still intact. So the New York Mets made their move. The team opened for business as usual on Monday morning, Jan. 3, and proceeded to make the first Major League Baseball transaction of the new decade. They released outfielder Bobby Bonilla, who had labored throughout a second go-around with his hometown team, and sent him off with a parting gift. Bonilla had one year remaining on his contract; the Mets owed him $5.9 million. Bonilla and his agent, sensing perhaps that the Mets were open to a more creative buyout, offered up several proposals, one being a theretofore unprecedented deal that deferred that remaining payment for 11 years — albeit with interest. The Mets agreed to, starting in 2011, pay Bonilla 25 annual installments of $1,193,248.20, a hefty markup ($23.9 million) over the original sum. Team ownership needed the roster spot to make other moves and were confident in their long-term financial prospects thanks to a can't-miss investment genius named Bernie Madoff.

That, of course, didn't work out, and by the time came for the checks to start getting sent two summers back, the team's financials were in ruin. Bobby Bonilla has been retired for 12 years, but he now re-emerges every spring as a representation of everything that was myopic about the Mets back then and is laughable about them now.

Back then, though, the move was celebrated, and there's now more than $100 million of this so-called "dead money" in MLB, Bonilla's slice comprising just a sliver. Bonilla-related laffs — he's good for a lot of tweets and splashy headlines, and his random clubhouse visit on Photo Day only amplified the matter — tend to obscure the details of the matter, a bizarre version of a not uncommon phenomenon, under a lot of LOLMets. (That said, it is certainly one of the great LOLMets instances, even in a very crowded field.)