Braves: All Is Well

Saw the Fox 5 promo Monday during 24…”a major announcement for the Braves”…since they showed Andruw, I wondered if they had locked him up with a new contract. I fired up the laptop to find that the sale had gone through.

Doesn’t look like too much will change with the new Liberty owners. They bought the Braves to avoid having to pay a lot of taxes, giving Time Warner a bunch of their stock back, which is what Time Warner needed as well. Liberty will probably hang on to the team for 4 – 5 years and sell them. Payroll will stay about the same, around 80 million…that’s right in the middle of all the teams.

Seems like the big-budget teams throw money around at players who aren’t really worth it. John Schuerholz has done an excellent job and getting the best bang for the buck. Moves these days are as much with the budget in mind as improving the team, but Schuerholz makes the moves with the overall team in mind, thinking not just for this year but also several years ahead. Moves are also made based on how many years certain players are signed for, and who’s coming up from the minor leagues.

Since Sid Bream slid home to beat the Pirates 15 years ago, the Pirates haven’t even had a winning record. Only the Yankees have had a record equal to the Braves over that time…other teams have had a good year or two, but not been in the pennant race every year. I expect the Braves to compete for the pennant again this year.

Some people were talking this weekend about how good Nava is. Every time we head down that way Ceil wants to go to Jalisco (I don't complain because the check will be smaller!) I do want to try the seafood place there in Ptree Battle.

Yesterday I was working on an order for Darryl, who me 3 pages of invoices. I thought it was one 3 page invoice, so I used the $7000 total in my calculations. Profit was higher than expected, but I attributed it to freight and internal charges. Only when it was invoiced did I notice that the $7000 was a 2 page invoice…I missed that the other page was a $5000 invoice. The rest of the day I was scrambling to get it fixed, but it finally was corrected.

At the same time Accounting misplaced $40,000 worth of invoices for one vendor. Since Accounting will move to Chicago in a year or two, the department is full of temps who aren’t good English speakers. Their manager can’t be bothered, so the chief Accountant has a mess on his hands. Someone in Chicago said things to the vendor without knowing the whole story, but the vendor stood by us, and the Chief Accountant cut a quick check for the $40,000. Now I’ve got to connect all the dots.