One of my goals for this year, as far as TTMs and my blog are concerned, is to do a better job of keeping up with how my TTMs are coming in on a monthly basis. I’ve always done a post for it but there wasn’t much to it and I didn’t broadcast it out to everyone when I did it. Those posts mostly focused on the totals for the previous month and what specifically failed while trying to determine why it might have failed.
I realized this year while prepping for my yearly report that I just liked digging into the data at that level. So I’m taking that same yearly approach and doing it on a monthly level. I’m sure this will evolve over time, but I hope to keep this up throughout this year and beyond. My goal will be to get it out before the 5th of the next month if not sooner, but you can see I’m already behind on that part of the goal.
The Monthly Numbers
This month was a very successful month on the whole. I received 38 successful returns and only four came back as failures. One of those failures I turned around and corrected the address issue within the same month.
Those 38 successful returns are one of the highest numbers for a month that I’ve had since getting back into TTMs and it makes me think my next goal will be achievable – 50 TTMs in a month. I know there’s folks out there that get way more than that AND that it’s also a matter of how many are sent out too.
You can see there was a bit of a lull in the middle of the month. I swear the mail folks don’t process first class mail for periods of time in my post office. I know tat I have different mail people on different days and I wonder if that has something to do with it. I used to have just one person every day.
Since I send out doubles, and the junk wax era would be great fodder for those, it never surprises me how much my successes are around that ’88-’93 range. It also doesn’t surprise me to have some big holes in the late ’90’s to early ’00’s because that was a gap in my collecting years. My hope is that the ’70’s will pick up in the next few months. A good trip to the card show at the end of last year got me some really great cards from those years that I’m specifically using for TTMs.
This is probably another obvious one. Topps is going to be the dominant brand by far. What’s interesting to me though is that Pro Set for how much football I’ve been doing overtakes the Fleer and Donruss I do for baseball. With one of my other TTM goals being to try for more basketball and hockey, I wonder how that will change over this year.
Lastly for the month I like to take a look at where the cards are from. That doesn’t mean where these folks live, but actually what’s on the card. New York might be obvious with two teams in every sport, bu I found it interesting that I got so many Braves back this month.
These are the Top 10 by team for January:
- Atlanta Braves – 11
- Baltimore Orioles – 9
- Chicago White Sox – 8
- Houston Astros – 7
- Montreal Expos – 7
- Toronto Blue Jays – 7
- New York Giants – 6
- New York Jets – 6
- New York Yankees – 5
- Washington Redskins – 5
Getting Trendy
These aren’t going to look that great now, but my plan is to show how the volume of successes changes throughout the year. Some of that might mean repeating some of the above charts, but some of these will be new. With one month in they just don’t look great yet. Some of them I’m not even sure where I’m going with it yet.
That last one is the one I’m really not sure about yet. It’s supposed to look at successes and failures but also the return time numbers (low, high, average, and median). We’ll see whether I give up on that or not.
This Good List for January
My four failures were Brook Lopez (who doesn’t appear to sign), Lance Parrish (who appears to be charging now), Dave Roberts (not sure why because I saw him sign others, and Elroy Face (who I ended up getting anyway). But the ones I’m happiest about getting back, either because they look good or just special to me (in order of receipt) are: Stump Mitchell, Jim Zorn, Earnest Byner, Jack McDowell, B.J. Surhoff, Henry Ellard, Nat Moore, Gary Reasons, Jon Matlack, Grant Jackson, and Bill Parcells.
You probably noticed I haven’t even posted all of those. That’s because I’m working with a backlog as I like to post just one a day. I’ll get to all of them in time.