The New York Mets' owners must pay up to $83 million to the trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff investors, a judge said Monday, though he expressed doubt that the trustee will succeed in proving at a trial this month that he's entitled to as much as $300 million more. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued his four-page ruling to narrow the subject of a March 19 trial in Manhattan that results from Trustee Irving Picard's effort to force the club's owners to pay as much as $1 billion into a fund established to repay thousands of investors cheated of billions of dollars during Madoff's decades-long fraud. Rakoff rejected a request by lawyers for the Mets' owners to say Picard wasn't entitled to more money, a ruling that would have eliminated the need for the trial. Amanda Remus, a spokeswoman for Picard, said the trustee and his lawyers were aware of Rakoff's order and were reviewing it. Sterling Partners, a business entity that includes the Mets' owners, said in a statement: "We are preparing for trial. We look forward to demonstrating that we were not willfully blind to the Madoff fraud. Nearly 5,000 investors were deceived in the fraud by the former NASDAQ chairman, who told them their $20 billion investment had grown to $68 billion by November 2008. Weeks later, he revealed his fraud, confessing that only several hundred million dollars were left. Rakoff's rulings limiting what Picard can collect have been encouraging to the Mets' co-owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, who have said they were victims of Madoff's fraud. The Mets announced last year that they were considering selling up to 25 percent of the franchise because of "uncertainty" caused by the lawsuit. Despite the upcoming trial, the tension surrounding the team over the Madoff issue seems to have relaxed. Wilpon said at an appearance in Port St Lucie, Fla., last week that the Mets' owners plan to keep the franchise "for a very long time." He cited a slashed payroll and an encouraging outlook in the courts. "When it started, there was a really big number out there and now - I'm not minimizing - but it's a different number," Wilpon said. Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence in North Carolina for his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Associated Press writer Ronald Blum contributed to this report from Clearwater, Fla.