May turned out to be the month of the mistake. That mistake was to not buy stamps. How the heck could I not buy stamps when my hobby is pretty much reliant on them. Ugh!
I waited way too long to buy them off eBay and then when I did I didn’t really pay attention to how long it was going to take to get to me. I think I ended up with at least a week of not having stamps to send things out. Maybe it was in between that and a week and a half.
Now you’re probably asking yourself, “why the heck didn’t he just go out and buy stamps?” Laziness probably. I’ll make an excuse and say I didn’t want to put more money into them because of my mistake but really, whatever I bought would be used eventually. I think since I’ve started getting them off of eBay and saving some money I don’t really want to go back.
Other than that it was a good month though.
Hope you all had a great month with whatever you’re collecting!
The Monthly Numbers
May was a bit of a down month. If you check out the graph by day below you can see that it sort of built to a better month at the end. I think we normally see that things are never really steady throughout the month no matter what, but there is definitely an upward trend for last month.
If we just look at the highs, there were nine days with four or more, five days with five or more and then the six and seven return days at the end of the month. I think some of the gaps from mid-month on are due to bad planning on replacing my stamps and not getting things out, plus the Memorial Day holiday. But even with those spikes at the end, they weren’t as big as they were in April.
The six return day right before the holiday surprised me. The seven return day after not so much. A lot of times after holidays you’ll see a spike as processing of mail still goes on.
I always watch how that spike in the early 90’s is on the heat map graph. The spike for 1993 has been building for baseball and it’s higher than the ’89-’90 range – Awesome. I’m also still seeing a pretty good chunk of ’68-’70 cards that I’m getting out from what I got at that card show earlier in the year. Definitely always nice to see those spikes in the ’60s and 70s.
Seattle and St. Louis really brought it home in May… literally brought it to my home! Seattle is somewhat common towards the top of this list, but St. Louis is not. After Minnesota in third, another smaller market, every thing really levels off for a bit.
Look at all those St. Louis Cardinals at the top of the list below. That’s definitely why they are at the top of the list. The Mariners had a little help from the Seahawks. Minnesota in third definitely had some Timberwolves and Vikings on top of a good chunk of Twins. As you might expect after looking at the way the graph above leveled off after third place, there’s a lot tied at the bottom of the list. Plus that only a spread of 4 between Cleveland and Toronto and those tied at the end.
Here are the Top 10 individual teams for the month (by cards returned):
- St. Louis Cardinals – 16
- Seattle Mariners – 14
- Cleveland Guardians/Indians – 10
- Toronto Blue Jays – 10
- Milwaukee Brewers – 9
- Baltimore Orioles – 8
- Houston Astros – 8
- Kansas City Royals – 8
- Texas Rangers – 8
- Chicago White Sox, Miami/Florida Marlins, Minnesota Twins, Philadelphia Phillies, and San Francisco Giants – all tied with 7
Getting Trendy
April started the downward trend and then May continued it unfortunately. I still don’t think I am completely out of the range I think I’ll be in for the rest of the year with 71 successful returns for the month. But I’d like to think that that’s the bottom of the range. The other thing I see is that my failures spiked a bit. I had seven failures for the month which I haven’t been close to since January. I don’t know that there’s a great rhyme or reason to that. Maybe I just took more chances.
Wow, football is way down. And then basketball and hockey are down too. Hockey might be a little closer to what it normally is though. I feel like I’m starting to run out of some good fodder to send out for things besides baseball though. Not to be negative, but I think all these other sports will trend down for the year. To save that I might have to find someone selling some good old wax or something like that.
Returns go down and the cards coming back go down for sure. That said, I think the drop is less dramatic in the amount of cards I got back. I didn’t calculate the percentage though. That’s just me eyeballing the chart.
The Overall Numbers
Overall I had 71 successful returns with seven failures. There were 242 cards in those envelopes that came back. Those numbers are all lows for the year. As I look back at previous years, it’s about this time that I usually see a lull, but I’m kind of surprised by it this year. I think normally it’s due to a shift to Spring Training attempts, but I did barely any of that this year.
When I look at it year over year I was 29% better in returns that I was for May last year and then I was 33% better in the amount of cards that came back. I might have two more months of that continuing before I’ll be behind that rate. Last year it was around August that I saw things really pick up. It looks like I’m at about 32% ahead of the pace I was at last year for returns and about 25% ahead of the page I was at last year for cards coming back. That’s going to start swinging the other way though.
He’s Making a List
The straggler numbers definitely fell in two ways. In April I had seven that were over 200. In May I had only four. Two of those were just over 200 and the other two were just over 300. However, there’s one that isn’t on the list below because it wasn’t a success. Brady Anderson returned cards back to me after 1469 days (send 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:
- Kurt Miller – 329
- Jake McGee – 311
- Bob Patterson – 222
- Kip Gross – 208
Lately I’ve been including my recent paid returns. For April those were:
- Steve Garvey – $20 – 4 cards (he included a 5th)
- Richie Zisk – $25 – 4 cards (he didn’t sign a 5th that I sent)
I hope things are going well – many happy returns!