By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

The DesignatedWriters.com staff feels compelled to apologize. It must have been some kind of clerical error — probably the fault of one of those interns we have running around the DW offices — but we plum forgot to let y’all know that July 1 was Bobby Bonilla Day.

(It also marked the halfway mark of 2019, so get those Christmas lists ready!)

If you don’t know about Bobby Bonilla Day, you should. Every July 1, the New York Mets put a check in the mail to Bonilla for $1.19 large. Very large. As in million.

Bobby hasn’t played for the Mets since 1999 and is 56 years old now, but that doesn’t stop him from waiting for the mailman when July rolls around. In 2000, the Mets bought out Bonilla’s contract, which was worth $5.9 million at the time. But instead of just writing the check, they negotiated a “deal” that they would send Bonilla almost $1.2 million every year for 25 years, starting in 2011. They rolled in 8 percent interest, but that was fine with them. They figured they could make that back because their financial guy was making a killing in a stock market and this guy was telling them about double-digits returns on their investments.

A guy named Bernie Madoff. What could possibly go wrong?!?!

So the Mets will end up paying Bonilla almost $30 million and could have gotten out for $6 million 20 years ago.

Stupid contracts aren’t the exclusive rights of the Mets. Believe it or not, they aren’t the only team still paying Bonilla (take a bow, Baltimore.)

And that’s a two-way street. Players get into stupid contracts as well. A couple of rising stars for the Atlanta Braves signed large contract extensions this year that in no way equals what their current career path shows their value might be.

Who knows what they will be worth in 2035 or if they will even be getting a check from a major league team by then.

But Bobby Bonilla will. On July 1.

This column originally appeared in The Times and The News-Star 6-30-2019

Has it really been 40 years since that gay and sunshiney teen-aged summer at my home in Claiborne Parish when my dad informed me that I’d flunked out of college?

Forty years. Sometimes it seems like only four decades. Wait a minute: that reminds me of a joke a funny friend told me. “There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can do math and those who can’t.”

I didn’t get that at first, another reason why it’s not hard to believe what happened in June 1979 when I came from my summer job at Beacon Gas Plant, where I had been given a role in Upper Management, which is how the wiseguy bosses defined my duties as concrete finisher, grass mower, and heavy-things toter. “You’ll manage,” they said.

Those guys…

I was covered in a mix of Claiborne Parish dirt and concrete leavings when my dad met me, smiling there in the kitchen of the First Baptist Church parsonage in Homer, holding a letter in his hand. I saw the Louisiana Tech letterhead and was immediately proud as that’s the very school I was attending. “Someone took the time to write my dad and mom and tell them how well I was doing,” was what I thought underneath my Atlanta Braves hat that was way overdue for an oil change. “I love my school.”

The wanderings of the ignorant mind never cease to amaze even mine.

I was preparing to act humble, start studying the kitchen floor and sort of kicking my shoes in an “Aw shucks” way when my dad’s face changed. I’d seen this a few times before, once when I’d backed into a tractor and put a dent in the car and once when a deacon had leaned back in a pew and lit up a Lucky Strike just as daddy was closing his sermon with a poem.

Heaven help.

“You flunked out,” he said. “Of school.”

He showed me the paper. (“At least he feels I can still read,” I remember thinking, hopefully.) Sure enough, I had a 0.1Something grade point average. I can’t remember what was after the 0.1 but, I mean, does it make a difference? 0.19 will still get you fired from school. Every time.

“If dumb were speed, you’d be a jet airplane,” he said. Dad had a way of summing up things so even the feeble-minded could understand. He communicated with me on my level. I had to appreciate that.

“Zoom?” I said.

He handed me the paper, said something like “Good luck in prison,” and left, I suppose to go hang around with smarter people. I felt bad because Elvis had died just two summers before, so it had been a tough couple of years for my family in general and for my dad in particular. We loved “Ebis.”

Mom weighed in later on my non-accomplishment, I think crying while stirring macaroni, mumbling something about how she remembered, though vaguely, me being a good student at one time. Responsible. Willing. Dependable.

“But maybe I have you confused with another one of my sons,” she said. This from a woman who had two daughters and me.

A good woman like that couldn’t sugar coat it. Wouldn’t have been fair to me. It was obvious that a D-plus effort in a Type A world wouldn’t get it. Momma had told me since I was little, “Remember, you’re unique—  just like everybody else.”

So long story short, I showered, left my ballcap off, and went to see Tech’s Dean of Admissions Patsy Lewis, who proved to be my Guardian Angel in Ruston. It’s a long story, but she told me to not miss class, to sit up front, and to do as I was told.

Joy. Rapture! It worked. And it really wasn’t even that hard.

To all those prospective freshmen out there, keep Mrs. Patsy’s advice nearby. Lean on it and trust it. It will save you tens of thousands of dollars, plus years of woe and wondering. The common denominator in all of our problems is the guy in the mirror.

I was actually taking care of a lot of my responsibilities that spring of 1979. But not all of them. And while college is so much more than learning a craft from professionals, it is at its core — since it’s college — about learning a craft. Or at least beginning to learn a craft.

Keep showing up. Sit up front. Do as you’re told. Non-conformity is a beautiful thing, but there are times in life when, to borrow the sentiment of an old friend, you can’t, for the sake of the team, be a smoking window when civility and society need you to be a non-smoking aisle.

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that I work at Tech today. And that I’m still in “Upper Management.” And proud of it.

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