This is one of the strangest baseball stories of the offseason. When Darryl Strawberry signed a contract with the Mets in 1985, $700,000 of his $1.8 million club option in 1990 was deferred. Strawberry didn’t pay over half a million dollars in taxes in the ’80s, and as a result, the IRS seized the annuity that the deferred money had been placed into.
Then, Strawberry and his wife divorced in 2006, but Strawberry never paid his now ex-wife what he owed her. Because he had never settled his initial tax debt, the annuity was still property of the IRS, and was was sold at auction.
Confused yet? Of course. I’ll let ESPN’s Darren Rovell take over from here.
The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday auctioned off the money owed to Darryl Strawberry from the New York Mets contract he signed in 1985.
A man, who did not want to be identified, agreed to pay $1.3 million to receive a check from the Mets of $8,891.82 a month for the next 18½ years. Assuming a realistic timeline for the court to approve the sale, the value of the deferred payments will equal close to $2 million.
Strawberry was forced to give a portion of the deferred money from the contract to his ex-wife, Charisse, as part of their divorce settlement in 2006, but the payments were never made. In 2010, Charisse filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and, as part of the proceedings, asked for what was owed. But in September, a judge in the Northern District of Florida ruled that the annuity was the property of the IRS, not Charisse, because Darryl still had not settled his tax debt owed for 1989, 1990, 2003 and 2004.
So in addition to the Mets paying Bobby Bonilla nearly $1.2 million a year until 2035, the team will be paying the auction winner nearly $9,000 a month until sometime in 2033 or 2034.
That’s one hell of an interesting investment. $1.3 million now for just shy of $8,900 a month for eighteen and a half years? If you’ve got money sitting around, why not?
[ESPN]
