I’m not sure what really constitutes a comeback, but March was a slight return to form. A comeback of sorts.
But what really is a comeback. If a team wins after being down by one is it a comeback? I’m not so sure it is. It might be in hockey or baseball where the scores are naturally lower. But I don’t think it is in football or basketball where there’s a lot more points to be scored. It’s really more of a matter of significance.
I majored in psychology and there were a lot of statistics classes. But at this point I’ve totally forgotten them, but I do know that statistical significance is important. A few data points in many might not technically be significant enough to call something a comeback.
So I’m not sure if March was a comeback compared to February, but it was better… and I’ll take it.
Hope you are all doing well out there!
The Monthly Numbers
March didn’t have the numbers that I really wanted, but it was better than February. When you look at all the daily data, it ends up being one bad week (maybe slightly more) that really impacted things. You can see in the below, the 14th through the 24th were definitely a down time. I was travelling for work during that time too (as I was for a lot of the end of the month) and there was nothing I could do about it. But really I can’t do anything about anything.
The other thing I am noticing was that I had a lot more days recently where I had no returns. I think I jinxed myself in February when I talked about it. I had thirty three mail days without a zero day return. Once that ended, it seems there’s been a good amount more.
As always the good ole “Heat Map” is fun to look at. The baseball part of it seems to be constantly changing. That’s definitely fun. You know I always love it when that spike appears outside of that ’89 to ’91 timeframe. There’s been a bunch of months more recently when that ’93 spike was there, but it still surprises me when it peaks like that. Other than that there’s a lot of little lumps on either side.
All the other sports though… those stinkers are always sitting in the ’90 to ’91 spots. Too bad. That’s really all I have though.
The big cities were back at the top for March. New York took the top spot followed but Los Angeles, Oakland and Philadelphia. All cities that fill all the sports with teams, some of them multiple teams in one sport. What I think is a little bit funny is that some of the teams that we tend to see a lot from smaller places are not in the list. Most of the significantly down, like Baltimore and Atlanta.
The Kansas City Royals, Oakland Athletics, Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers, and Pittsburgh Pirates all showed up again in the Top Ten last month. You can see which teams carried, or at least added a good amount to those big cities in the graph above too.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- Philadelphia Phillies – 14
- California Angels – 12
- Cleveland Indians – 11
- Kansas City Royals – 10
- Oakland Athletics – 10
- San Diego Padres – 9
- Minnesota Twins – 8
- New York Yankees – 8
- Seattle Mariners – 8
- Four teams tied with 7 (Milwaukee Brewers, New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Francisco Giants)
Getting Trendy
Getting back to the comeback talk, you can see how the monthly numbers were back up again. But as I mentioned earlier, is it really significant? I don’t really think it is. What I can tell you is that what does look significant is the drop between January and both February AND March. I was hoping that I would sit around 80 or something like that for most months.
Maybe I’m on the way up to the 80 or so I’m looking for.
I went ahead and fixed the chart and the mistake I made for the February numbers. I had the basketball numbers mixed up with the football numbers. What I do like is there’s some variety back across the sports. I am not sure if that’s really going to make it through the year. I’m starting to run out of things I can send for the other sports. Maybe I can try to stretch it.
How do the cards coming back go down when the returns coming back go up? I think this is the nature of where I am with going through the stacks of TTM stuff I have to send. I just recently got through picking through dupes and and some reorganization of my TTM cards. Hopefully that would mean I’m getting more back. I just think I am at the end of what I have to send out and that tends to mean I’m sending less cards with each attempt.
The Overall Numbers
The overall numbers were 73 successes with three failures. That’s five more successes and one more failure in the monthly numbers. The cards that came back totaled 231 cards. That’s a drop of 36 cards from February.
From the Year-Over-Year perspective I was down 28% compared to the same month last year. That’s down 28% for both the returns and the cards that came back. Kind of odd that it worked out the same for both of those numbers. As for the pace I’m on, I’m 23% down in returns and 14% down in cards. I know I’m going to be down overall, I just don’t really know what to expect of how far I should be down.
He’s Making a List
As per usual, I like to look at the stragglers. I had 15 returns come back after more than 200 days. It was a good spread of them. But that’s more than double last months AND the 1736 days from Mike Bordick is 500 days more than the longest from February.
Something else that you might see interesting in the list is a few names listed twice. Mike Bordick, Eric Wedge and Ed Hearn (who you only see one of below) all returned two attempts. Some other returns were returns where I got back an older return and I had already gotten back a newer return from them some other recent time.
Here the list of anything 200 days or more:
- Mike Bordick – 1736
- Manny Trillo – 1126
- Bill Plummer – 695
- Eric Wedge – 627
- Ed Hearn – 604
- George Canale – 512
- Jack Del Rio – 504
- Mike Bordick – 460
- Darwin Barney – 371
- Winston Bennet – 332
- Eric Wedge – 289
- Larvell Blanks – 284
- Jack Baldschun – 282
- Stephone Paige – 242
- Scott Garrelts – 201
As for paid returns, I did get some back in February:
- Junior Ortiz – 4 cards – $20
- Dave Parker – 2 cards – $40
- Steve Garvey – 4 cards – $20
- Howard Johnson – 2 cards – $20 (changed from $5 per to $10)
- Dave Kingman – 4 cards – $20
- Juan Berenguer – 5 cards – $10
March was again a short list of returns, just like February:
- Howard Johnson – RTS – tried successfully at another address
- Doug Dascanzo – RTS – tried again to what looked like a new address
- Jeff Heathcock – RTS – I couldn’t find another address to try
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!