PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- The New York Mets are preparing for the baseball season, and the team's owners will have to prepare for trial.

U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled Monday that Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon, his family, businesses and charities must pay as much as $83.3 million to the trustee trying to recover funds to net losers in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. He also ruled that the sides will go to trial March 19 over an additional $303 million that trustee Irving Picard is seeking.

Of the approximately $83 million, only $1.7 million is associated with Mets accounts. The rest is associated with other Wilpon businesses and charities.

The Wilpons' lawyers had filed a motion to have the case tossed entirely, but that was rebuffed by Rakoff in Monday's ruling.

"We are preparing for trial," Sterling Partners, one of Wilpon's holdings, said in a statement. "We look forward to demonstrating that we were not willfully blind to the Madoff fraud."

As a matter of law, Picard had contended, he was entitled to $83,309,162 in Ponzi scheme profit allegedly made by the Wilpons in the immediate two years before Madoff's arrest on Dec. 11, 2008.

The Wilpons had asserted that because they thought they had $500 million invested with Madoff at the time his scheme was discovered by authorities, they actually were losers -- despite withdrawing more money than they had deposited with Madoff.

Picard believes he also is entitled to $303 million in principal invested by the Wilpons with Madoff because, he alleges, they had warning signs a fraud might be occurring. Rakoff has set a high standard for Picard to be able to collect principal -- "willful blindness," meaning the Wilpons would have had to all but have known something was awry with Madoff and purposely looked the other way.