You know that feeling when time seems to be getting away from you? It felt like that summed up my month of August. There were just so many times I felt like something snuck up on me. Some of those times were maybe bigger or more important than others. Other times it didn’t really sneak up on me, it’s just not wanting the embrace the reality of the situation.
- My oldest is a senior, so there’s that.
- The summer is pretty much over and I really hadn’t used my time off like I wanted.
- My unwritten blog posts keep piling up on me.
- Dates for work deliverables seem to appear out of nowhere.
Just a few examples. But the mental work to catch up to these things when you don’t want to think about them is unbelievable. That was pretty much my August. Hopefully I can turn that feeling around.
Hope you are all doing well out there!
The Monthly Numbers
August was definitely struggling to keep the pace with previous months. I’ve been sending out a lot less than last year, but the amount I’m sending out has been pretty consistent. For last month though, I think WHAT I was sending out probably impacted the total.
I focused a lot of what I was sending, maybe 25-30% on coaches and current players in the major and minors. In general, that’s not the type of attempt that has a high rate of return. And that’s even if you are concentrating on guys that are more reliable. But the other thing is that they generally don’t return in the same time frame as those that are not active players or coaches. So naturally I was thinking there would be a bit of a dip.
Somehow there wasn’t too much of one in August. Actually when you look at the chart below, it really looks like August was a great month. The difference is really the numbers along that Y-axis. In July my top number was eight and I hit that four times. But last month my top number was a six and I only hit it one time. So August was maybe a more consistent month in that I had less days with nothing, but also less days with a ton.
I guess it’s different strokes for different… returns? Months?
I think most people (i.e., people that aren’t me) would look at my heat map data and think they all look exactly the same. So yeah, they probably do. But not to me. Sure the junk wax spike is always there, but I like looking a little past that.
First, I would say say that baseball is a lot more spread out than July was from the ’86 to ’94 range. It almost hits the same high mark in 1990, but there’s more spread between those years. And I always see the spike get accentuated because of the hockey and football. But the second thing I see is that in July the orange for football skewed to the left and this time it was to the right of the 1990 peak.
There’s a little less going on toward the left side for August and I guess that was probably bound to happen after a little more of that in July.
The numbers for the “Location Tracker” graph don’t look too terribly different than last month. But of course the names at the bottom changed. August was another month were there was a pretty good gradual changed downward. But I think the Top 10 stayed with all higher numbers than the Top 10 did in July.
Dallas/Texas took the top spot this month with New York in second and then some smaller locations like Kansas City and Minnesota. There’s always a lot of change with this list which makes it fun. Like in July it was Pittsburgh in the top spot and last month they were a lot further down.
Rangers cards make up most of that top number you see below. There was one Cowboys card and I really have so little Cowboys cards signed. So that was a little bit out of the blue. The Royals powered most of the Kansas City number as well so you can see how baseball carries most places. But it is nice to see football in the list with the Bills popping in there in the bottom.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- Texas Rangers – 22
- Kansas City Royals – 15
- Baltimore Orioles – 13
- Seattle Mariners – 13
- Detroit Tigers – 11
- San Diego Padres – 11
- Chicago Cubs – 10
- Minnesota Twins – 10
- Three teams with 9 – Boston Red Sox, Buffalo Bills, California Angels
Getting Trendy
Sure that blue line went down a bit. But I think in general that trend is pretty even. I’m really wondering how September is going to go because of all the current coaches and players attempts I have out there. But if I can keep that line hovering around 80 per month, I would be really happy with that for the rest of the year.
As you can see below this is the second month with no basketball returns. I would say I’m taking a break from basketball, and maybe I am, but I think it’s more that I am kind of running out of things to send out. I just did another pull of basketball cards, but I think the vast majority of what I’m going to send out is going to be an additional attempt for guys I already have. I’m guessing I might not see results for that until October.
The football number did jump up a bit because I just pulled a another round of cards. I’ve also been monitoring for some new names I can send to. If you didn’t notice, I got a few of those ’92 GameDay cards to send out.
The trend in the amount of cards coming back is going down, but I think it’s in a range of saying its somewhat steady right now. I think I’d like to see it in the 270-range rather than where it was last month at 255. I think a lot of that is that I have some attempts I’ve made where I just don’t have the cards for the player, so I just send what I have instead of waiting to see if I can find more.
The Overall Numbers
In August I had 77 successful returns and 6 failures. Those returns brought back 255 cards. The failure number remained steady. I’ve been attempting some more new names so I think that’s a good sign that the failures number isn’t jumping for those folks.
When I look at the Year-Over-Year numbers, this is where it gets a little disappointing. The only reason it is that way is because last year was so insane. This is around the time that I escalated the numbers I was sending out and that meant I was getting more successes back. I was 10% down from last August’s success and 15% down in the cards that came back. It’s hard not to be disappointed by that number. But I think if I looked at my success rate, it’s probably pretty similar. I can’t go by volume of returns if my volume of attempts is lower. But it’s hard to think about it that way.
If I look at it from a pace perspective, I’ve got about 72% of the returns and around 68% of the cards from last year’s total. If you consider there’s more than 20% of the year left, that means somehow I could get close to last year’s totals still. I would just be doing it in a different way.
He’s Making a List
August definitely had some stragglers. The longest of which was Paul Wilson. I saw others get him back and I almost didn’t even remember sending to him. The most interesting though is Kurt Stillwell. There were actually two stragglers in the same month from him. The interesting part is that I got back my more recent attempt first in less than half the time as the other. I had pretty much just written the first one off.
Here the list of anything 200 days or more:
- Paul Wilson – 936
- Kurt Stillwell – 787
- Wade Davis – 409 (Failure)
- Kurt Stillwell – 280
- Ron Francis – 277
- Carwell Gardner – 270
- Rulon Jones – 205
- Shane Greene – 202
As for my list of paid returns, this month was pretty good. There were seven paid returns. I don’t know that Pedro Garcia generally charges, but I was sending him more than he usually signs so I thought I would throw in a few bucks. Here’s the full list:
- Lee Smith – $40 – 2 cards
- John Candelaria – $40 – 4 cards
- Mike Boddicker – $25 – 5 cards
- Jack Billingham – $20 – 4 cards
- Joel Youngblood – $20 – 4 cards
- Pedro Garcia – $10 – 3 cards
- Bob Veale – $10 – 2 cards
I figured I would give you my list of failures and their reasons as well. It wasn’t necessarily an out of the ordinary month in this department:
- Wade Davis – Team returned, he retired
- Ryan Fitzpatrick – Return to Sender
- Art Shamsky – Charges $15 and send to different address
- Bob Tolan – Charges $15, returned my cards and the money I sent
- Mark Williamson – Changed address
- Rick Waits – Return to Sender
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!