Something really great and downright neighborly happened to me in recent weeks. It makes you realize there are good people out there… somewhere. Well, know I actually know where some are.
Apparently I have terrible handwriting. I think I have starting writing my house number a little bit lazily and the “7” in my address at times might look like a “1”. At least to the mail machines it does. That has gotten it confused with another address locally. The strange part is, it’s not someone down my street. It’s actually someone a few neighborhoods over. Probably almost a mile away.
I got a large envelope with one of my return envelopes in it, completely intact. There was a note saying how they don’t know how my address gets confused with theirs but it does and they they receive and return my mail a lot. I think it’s great that they take the time to reroute it. I know I’ve delivered things to people in my neighborhood, but I don’t think I’ve experience this outside my neighborhood multiple times like this.
So I sent them a thank you note with a $10 gift card to target and told them all about what I do and how important to me it was that they were nice. Sometimes I hesitate to tell someone there’s something worthwhile in the envelope because maybe they will take it, but my wife actually suggested I tell them. I think neighbors have brought her my envelopes before and she’s told them about my hobby and it actually has made it something they look out for a bit more. Sometimes I’ve even had a neighbor find my stuff in their yards or in the street (must have fallen out along the route).
Anyway, good people are out there. Maybe they will find you!
Hope you all had a great month with whatever you’re collecting!
The Monthly Numbers
June was a bounce back month. May was starting to trend better if you look back a the same chart below. But June had brought back some really strong days.
I don’t see days of nine returns very often but there was one in there plus two days of eight returns. Also seven returns of five or more. That’s what gets you the makings of a pretty strong month. There were definitely some empty days in there too so the big days help to make up for that.
In May I had a bit of a dip for 1989 and ’90 in baseball which I generally like to see because of how strong those years usually are. This time 1993 was even stronger as was 1988. Of course the football, basketball and hockey makes up for that a bit. And it was another month that was pretty strong in the late 1960’s and through the 70’s. But June was a little lesser in the late 90’s and on than May was
Wow the big cities REALLY showed up this month. The top three in the cart below are all at least nine over the top city from May. Of course those are all cities with multiple teams. After the top four (ish) it generally looks like it normally does at it just sort of steps down as it goes.
Even though Los Angeles/Anaheim is the top of the chart above, you can see that it really didn’t take multiple teams to bring it to the top. Last month was pretty much all Angels all the time apparently. I never feel like I notice that stuff as its happening. From there check out the number two team… the Astros are number two and that was only good enough to make Houston fourth on the list above.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- California/Los Angeles Angels – 26
- Houston Astros – 17
- Chicago White Sox – 16
- Cincinnati Reds – 15
- Atlanta Braves – 13
- Milwaukee Brewers – 13
- Texas Rangers – 13
- San Diego Padres – 10
- New York Mets – 9
- New York Yankees – 9
Getting Trendy
I just love it when those lines start growing bigger. In June I saw 10 more returns than I did in May And my failures went down. I had 81 returns and that should be about the bottom of what I think my range is. So far it seems like July is going well so far, but I don’t want to jinx anything.
When I looked back at May I was thinking about how down football and the other sport were. Well, they didn’t really jump back up at all did they. I guess hockey got stronger, but I really don’t have much of that left to go out so I think it might show a little bit more life and then die out by the end of the year. I think basketball might be pretty dead already. Football is going to have a little bit of a boom soon.
You can see when the returns go up the cards go up. But in June the cards had a little extra boost for some reason. I’m just judging that by looking back at April where it was a little more in returns and a little less in cards.
The Overall Numbers
It was a good month with 81 returns and 288 cards in those returns. All that with only five failures. That’s an uptick over May and the trend is going back in a good direction. Hopefully May was the lull I see around this time of year and I just get steady for the rest of the year.
June returns were 42% better than last year for the same month and the card total was 32% better. There’s a ton of numbers I’m looking at and I might be starting to confuse myself but I think my all my totals are at least 50% of what I did last year. If you look at it from a pace perspective I think I am 34% better in returns at this point last year and 26% better in cards. But I think last year it was sometime in the next three months where things really exploded and I know I won’t be able to keep up with that.
He’s Making a List
April had a lot of stragglers and then May dropped down a bit. Well, June seemed to bring them out of the woodwork again. After a May with just four stragglers, this month I saw eight. That was even higher than in April. But that doesn’t even count the strangest one of all.
I actually mentioned it last month because I was looking at the data too far into June and didn’t keep track of the date column in my spreadsheet. But Brady Anderson returned cards back to me after 1469 days (sent in May 2018). I don’t mind the stragglers because of interesting stuff like that. I’d like them to be successes if possible though.
Here the list of anything 200 days or more:
- Brady Anderson – 1469 (Failure)
- Sean Casey – 704
- Roy Hinson – 431
- Mark Macon – 406
- Lenn Sakata – 380
- Scott Scudder – 335
- Sonny Jackson – 300
- Don Kessinger – 269
- Terry Leach – 202
Lately I’ve been including my recent paid returns. For June those were:
- Felix Millan – $10 – 2 cards (I thought maybe a sawbuck would mean he used a Sharpie… nope)
- Tito Fuentes – $5 – 1 cards (gotta have the hat/headband combo signed)
- Greg Olson – $5 – 5 cards (last time he mentioned throwing in a little for Little League I think)
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!