I generally don't bet on baseball because I don't want to jinx my team. I'm still convinced my secretly Dad bet on the Mets/Yankees Series in 2000 and that's why the Mets lost. But I do bet every year with a friend of mine about the Mets regular season. Usually it's the number of wins in the current season, but this year it was whether they would make the playoffs. I finally won the bet for a change and my friend owes me a steak dinner, although he's trying to say we later changed that to a round of drinks and a table dance at the Bush Co. I don't remember changing the bet, but I'll probably go along with it.

Like or dislike the Wilpons, they got majorly screwed over by Bernie Madoff. I think they lost half a $billion. The (fake) returns on their investments were the reason they structured player contracts the way they did. It made sense to invest the money with Madoff and get 10-15% returns on it and then pay the payer deferred payments later.