US District Judge Jed Rakoff on Tuesday narrowed a $1 billion lawsuit against the Mets owners and on Wednesday issued an additional written order on the litigation, which could have implications for the trustee’s other so-called clawback lawsuits.

Rakoff wrote that, “the most that the trustee can recover from the defendants is the the total of all transfers made during the two-year period prior to the filing of the bankruptcy petition, which, according to the amended complaint, appears to be approximately $386 million.”

The judge will hear lawyers for trustee Irving Picard and the Mets owners, including Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, on Wednesday afternoon in Manhattan federal court. He asked them to be ready to set a briefing schedule for the case, which has a proposed trial date of March 5.

Picard is the trustee for the defunct Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, the investment advisory arm of which was at the center of a multibillion-dollar, decades-long Ponzi scheme. Madoff ran a classic Ponzi scheme; when investors needed to be paid, he used money deposited by other investors.

Wednesday’s court order said that it remained “an open question” whether, in determining what portion of the $386 million should be considered principal and what portion as fictitious profits, reference should be made only to the two-year period or to earlier transfers of money as well.

Rakoff said that to recover principal, Picard would have to show the Mets owners “willfully blinded themselves” to “red flags” of Madoff’s scheme. His opinion on Tuesday suggested that the trustee might have difficulty meeting this standard.

Mets owners had sought to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming they did not suspect Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, and never bought insurance to protect themselves against fraud.

The lawsuit has threatened the owners’ hold on the Mets, which are losing tens of millions of dollars a year, prompting them to try selling part of the Major League Baseball team.

Picard has filed more than 1,050 lawsuits on behalf of former Madoff customers seeking more than $94 billion. Madoff, 73, was arrested in December 2008 and pleaded guilty in March 2009. He is serving a 150-year prison term.