Everything and everyone seems to have their ups and downs. I seem to be having a down right now, just like my TTMs for February. We’ll get to the cards later.
First of all, don’t worry about me, I’m fine. With work being crazy it just feels like I can’t catch up on anything. Everything feels busy all at the same time… work, band, hobby, personal stuff, house stuff, etc.. I really am feeling like I felt two years ago around this same time when things were getting crazy at work then too.
Normally that’s when it’s nice to have the hobby to fall back on. It still is, but when you start making your hobby more during the easy times it can catch up with you at the worst times. Like now. I feel like I’m only barely keeping up with the blog but somehow I am still keeping up.
I think the evidence of all this is in me getting this out on the 16th – yikes!
Hope you are all doing well out there!
The Monthly Numbers
February was a little bit of a down month if we look at the volume of successes, and we will later, but when you really think about it it’s not too bad. There’s a holiday in there and it’s short on other months by two to three days besides the holidays. So between three to four less days at maybe three cards a day. You could be adding something like nine to twelve cards to the monthly total. That definitely makes it more respectable. But that doesn’t mean I don’t look at the overall total and feel just a tiny bit of disappointment. Technically it was similar to the dip I saw last year.
I did see a streak end too. If you go back to January I think I went like thirty three consecutive mail days with at least one return before I missed getting one. That’s pretty impressive. I have the data to check and see if that is a record for me, but I’m not going to take the time to dig into it. Yes, I am lazy.
I think the “Heat Map” looks a bit odd for February. I’m really not used to that much of a sport besides baseball with that big a spike. Especially not from recent months. It’s a good “odd” though. I’ll always take a bigger peak anywhere.
There was definitely a lot more spread in January than there was in February. The foothills around that peak are pretty small.
Don’t look now but Chicago and L.A. have been going at it up at the top for the last few months. In January L.A. took the top spot and dropped Chicago down and in February Chicago made a comeback and bounced L.A. from the top. But it’s very even up there in the Top 5 on the list below. After that there’s a good drop before the next several even out a bit. Cincinnati kind of surprises me a bit up there.
The A’s and Pirates are the only teams making an appearance in the Top 10 for individual teams last month. You can see where the Reds did there thing this month though.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- Milwaukee Brewers – 15
- Cincinnati Reds – 14
- Oakland Athletics – 14
- Minnesota Twins – 11
- Montreal Expos – 11
- Pittsburgh Pirates – 10
- Chicago White Sox – 9
- Kansas City Royals – 9
- Toronto Blue Jays – 9
- Boston Red Sox – 8
Getting Trendy
Ugh, a drop like that always looks terrible. It’s like a car crash and is hard to avoid looking at. Normally when the successes go down the failures do as well, but it was definitely nice to just see two of those.
What this does make me think about though is what if these are my high and low for the year. I would love that it everything fit right between these two bars. That would mean some good consistency.
This chart looks a little suspect. It looks like I put my basketball success number in my football success box. I’m not changing my chart below (I know, lazy again) but I’ll change it in my file for next month’s post. I think I did that because I normally count basketball second but football is the next box in my file.
When the returns go down the total cards back is going to go down to. No surprise there. But I think the pace of the number of cards I got back ended up holding up pretty well in the end. We’ll see if these bars will be my high and low for the year on the cards that came back too, just like above.
The Overall Numbers
I had 68 successful returns in February with two failures. Those 68 successes brought in 267 cards. So that was a 13 return drop in successes and a 78 card drop in cards in those returns. But again if you consider another few mail days in the month I could have had closer to 80 successes and maybe 300 cards back. That wouldn’t have been as bad a dip. Last year I saw a dip in February too.
The Year-Over-Year number weren’t too bad. I was down 11% in returns compared to the same month last year. But I was actually 3% better in total cards. So you never know how things will turn out until they do. Overall I am down about 20% on returns from last year and 8% on cards compared to the pace I was on last year. But at this point I am sending out about 25% less than I was last year. So technically I am doing better with what I am sending out.
He’s Making a List
I like to report the stragglers here and I didn’t actually see a straggler (over 200 days) until eight days into the month. Once I saw that one it picked up a little bit. But there were only seven for the whole month. And some significant ones again like January.
Here the list of anything 200 days or more:
- Marion Butts – 1202
- Luis Gonzalez – 1075
- Rick Honeycutt – 779
- Carl Willis – 351
- Terry Steinbach – 342
- Pete Mackanin – 234
- Jim Deshaies – 206
As for paid returns, I did get some back in February:
- John Odom – 4 cards – $20
- Jim Kaat – 2 cards – $50
- Terry Steinbach – 4 cards – $20
- Bert Campaneris – 4 cards – $20
- Boomer Esiason – 4 cards – $20
- Eric Deckerson – 1 card – $20
- Bill Gullickson – 4 cards – $10
With only two failures for the month it’s not much of a list. Both of them I got back out and they’ve since been returned successfully. I think my terrible handwriting my be the culprit on these:
- Bob Boone – RTS – no mail receptacle but resent and it went through OK.
- John Offerdahl – RTS – but same thing I just resent
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!