The owners of the New York Mets baseball team owe up to $83 million to the trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff investors, according to the ruling by a federal judge on Monday.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff doubts, however, that the trustee will succeed at a trial on March 19 that he is entitled to as much as $300 million more.

The court-appointed trustee Irving Picard previously sued the Mets' owners Saul Katz and Fred Wilpon, saying that they had to know Madoff was acting illegally.

In the lawsuit, Picard said the Mets' owners received $83.3 million in fictitious profits and $301 million in principal in the two years before a bankruptcy was filed for Madoff assets.

Lawyers for the Mets' owners said that their clients had no idea Madoff wasn't investing their money as he said he was.

"Conclusions are no substitute for facts, and too much of what the parties characterized as bombshells proved to be nothing but bombast," Rakoff wrote.

"Nevertheless," he added, "there remains a residue of disputed factual assertions from which a jury could infer either good or bad faith."

Rakoff had ruled last year that the team's owners wouldn't owe more than $386 million to other Madoff investors. He said the trustee must prove that the Mets' owners "willfully blinded" themselves to Madoff's fraud to get more.

The Mets owners, on behalf of partners at their holding company Sterling Equities, said in a statement, "We are preparing for trial. We look forward to demonstrating that we were not willfully blind to the Madoff fraud."