How many times do you mess up the year change in your regular life? And for how long does that last?
The reason I ask is because it’s February and I messed things up in this post. We’re a month in and I still can’t get it right. That’s pretty much par for the course with me though on a lot of things these days. I had to go back and check everything because I noticed I messed up at least one thing. Such a pain!
That’s not the most high profile mistake I made though. At least not high profile in my life. The other day at work I was putting together some metrics to show a Vice President and I messed up everything. I had 21s and 22s, I had CY (Calendar Year) and FY (Fiscal Year), you name it I messed it up. And our Fiscal and Calendar years don’t go hand-in-hand so there might have been mistakes on top of mistakes.
Then of course that distracts from the actual presentation and information as people start to do a couple things. First, every single thing gets questioned. Is that what you really meant to use? But also, as we know from how social media goes, people LOVE to point out mistakes… and not in a constructive way either. Everyone wants to be right, or more importantly sometimes I think… more right than the other person.
Thankfully it was a good month and distracted me from all these mistakes I made. Hey, maybe the good month made me make the mistakes because I was thinking about my TTMs? Yeah, let’s go with that.
The Monthly Numbers
Still I Rise… if you are an F1 or Lewis Hamilton fan that will be familiar. But what I’m trying to say is the numbers keep going up. My amazing 2021, especially the end of it continued into 2022. Not really a surprise in a way because I kept up the pace I was sending out through the end of the year and I didn’t slow it down until January. Always nice to see though.
The holidays and the snow made the first several days a bit of a bummer. I didn’t get my first mail day until the 5th. That certainly makes Informed Delivery such a tease. But it paid off on in that first mail day with my highest daily number ever – 15! You can add the two failures I got that day if you want to.
After that though it was a pretty good month in general. There were thirteen days with five or more returns (not counting the failures on those days). Pretty great that half the month was well… pretty great.
The Heat Map looks a little more interesting that it usually does to me. We still have that spike there in the ’90-’91 range, but what’s that I see? Look slightly to the left… do you see it? There’s that little spike of baseball. Holy Crap! 1993 baseball beat our the late 80’s and very early 90’s years! I never though I would see the say. There’s a bunch going through 2003 too. I think those mid-to-late 70’s spikes are a bit lower than they had been in the past, but I can still see them.
After several months of the top two or three locations really destroying everything else, December 2021 and now January 2022 have been pretty much gradual-ish declines in the numbers through the rest of the chart. This also might be the first time in a while that the major cities really took most of the top stops. It looks to me like four of the top five spots are major markets: Chicago, San Francisco/Oakland, New York, and Boston. The one that snuck in is Minnesota at number four.
The top four teams that came back all would have beat out the highest number put up last month. Plus the next two at 16 would have tied for the top spot. It makes sense that if some of those small market areas are going to show up in the location list that there would have to be certain teams showing out – especially in baseball. So no surprise to see the Indians, Twins, and Pirates in there.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- Cleveland Indians – 20
- Minnesota Twins – 19
- Boston Red Sox – 18
- Oakland Athletics – 18
- Chicago Cubs – 16
- Pittsburgh Pirates – 16
- Five tied with 15 – Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers
Getting Trendy
At the beginning of a year it’s hard to show that anything is getting trendy, especially if I’m not going to show you the months prior. If you want you can check out December’s post, or you can trust me. The total number last month surpassed that 120 line. That’s pretty amazing to me.
There were a bit more failures last month too. I almost made it into double digits. It was the normal mix of guys not signing in general, guys charging, me messing up an address, or just a really bad attempt in general.
It’s always great to start the year with a lot of colors on this chart. However, I’m going to have to tell you that the next several months those are probably going to go down a bit. I’m reaching the end of some of my other sport TTM fodder, especially in hockey. Unless I do another significant pickup in cards, I think that might die down for this year. That’s OK though. It was a focus of mine for last year to get more than baseball. I did it and if I can keep expanding I will, but it might not happen.
This is the second time in three months that I made it over 400 cards in the returns that came back. In November I got back 401 and this month was even higher at 407. More numbers I never imagined I would get back and I imagine I won’t see again this year.
The Overall Numbers
January saw 123 returns and nine failures. That’s eight more returns than I had month and makes it my best month ever. On top of that I had 407 cards come back, six more than my top month (November 2021). I really think this will be my best month this year so I’ve got to change my mindset otherwise I’m gonna be in a bad state comparing things to last year’s numbers.
Because of the amazing month the Year-over-Year perspective will be crazy, and that’s considering that last January was a pretty darn good month. I had 68% more returns than I did last year in January when I had 73. From a cards perspective I had almost 55% more cards (407 compared with 263). I think in looking at the numbers it will be between April and July that I have the best chance to match or beat any of the numbers from last year.
He’s Making a List
We’ll start with the stragglers. There were a few more than I’ve been seeing lately. And there were a few more pretty long ones at that. The longest was the Aaron Judge that I sent back in 2017. While I know we all write things off, do we ever truly give up hope? Sometimes I think I do, but I think we all need to be positive and say they just haven’t come back yet.
Here the list of anything 200 days or more:
- Aaron Judge – 1663
- Greg Kragen – 554
- Manny Trillo – 379
- Larry Casian – 306
- Brad Keller – 253
- Mike Simms – 253
- Richie Shaffer – 200
I feel like I got way to many to list favorites this month. I did get a load of paid returns back. I think I’ll pick one… Keith Hernandez via PastPros. It was the first time I used PastPros and that was really the guy I was waiting to start it off with.
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!