News of Shohei Ohtani's new 10 year, $700 million dollar contract has we here at CSN thinking about all-time bag getting. So, we are proud to announce our inaugural class of people getting paid in obscene or widely considered undeserved amounts. We salute our entertainers who taking money from billionaires.
Bobby Bonilla (Major League Baseball) - 1986-2035 ($94 million)
What makes Bobby Bonilla the perfect first entrant into the Hall of Fame is the pure bilking of billionaires. The amount of money isn't a lot, by modern sports contracts, but the longevity is what's legendary. Bobby Bonilla has not played a professional baseball game since 2001 and is still on the books for two teams. Due to deferred payments by both the New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles, his contracts with those teams were spread out over the next three decades. This means he's earning $500,000 from the Orioles and $1.9 million from the Mets every year. The Orioles will be free of their obligation after their 2028 payment.
Kirk Cousins (National Football League) - 2012-2023 ($231 million)
The money itself isn't otherworldly compared to someone like Aaron Rodgers (2005-2025, $418m) or Patrick Mahomes (2017-2031, $496m), but for what he did to the league. The NFL was a league that did not do Fully Guaranteed contracts, meaning that some portion of the large contract players signed, even the big name quarterbacks, could be clawed back by the team for things like injuries, or they wouldn't have to pay it all out if they cut the player. Cousins changed that by being the first player to receive a fully guaranteed contract. Additionally, th is followed by two years of being on the Franchise tag, which paid him the average of the top 5 paid QBs those years, plus a bonus for being on it the second time. This put him in the same strata as MVP candidates while being a middling starter.
Timofey Mozgov (National Basketball Association) - 2010-2022 ($87 million)
Timofey Mozgov is the perfect example of "Right place, right time". He was part of the championship winning Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2015-2016 season, which raised his stock somewhat. What followed though was a new league TV deal kicking in, spiking the league's salary cap by over $20 million. This influx of cap space caused some teams to get stupid and give bigger contracts to role players. Mozgov was one of those, who went from earning $4.95m in 2015-2016, to $16.5m in 2016-2017. He went from earning 7% of a team's salary cap, to 17%. He only played two seasons after signing that contract (2016-2017 for the Lakers, who then traded him to the Brooklyn Nets for 2017-2018). He was traded again, but never played another game, until he was waived by the Orlando Magic, and his remaining salary was stretched over 3 years. For doing the most with the least, we salute you.
Thank you all for joining us for this initial Gettin' That Bag Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
All contract information is coming from Spotrac, and other stats come from Baseball Reference and Basketball Reference