2019 Year In Review

For the past 2 years, I have taken a look at how the past year has impacted my collection, and I thought I should continue again this year and see what changed in 2019!

2019 Highlights

• 2019 saw the second anniversary of the blog, with #3 coming up quickly this Spring. I can't believe I've been doing this regularly this long, to be honest.
• My Repack Haiku series continues to be my weekly blog filler, and I wrote my 100th haiku earlier this year. This of course was celebrated with a trivia contest.
• The Time Travel Trading Project also continues to go strong! I made 21 trades this year, and my next time travel trade will be #50 overall! At the beginning of the year, the oldest card obtained started out as a 1938 Church & Dwight Useful Birds of America card. That "record" was broken twice over, first by a 1922 C&D bird card and then again with a 1915 C&D! I officially crossed the century mark in my time travel!
• Many of those trades came through the TCDB. I reached a new high with trading this year thanks to 32 trades through that web site. 
• I kicked off a collecting goal early in the year, My Golden Sox Project! It's a casual goal, but so far I've collected 4 out of the 31 cards. Not a bad start!
• I completed 5 sets/inserts in 2019 (1981 Topps Coca-Cola Boston Red Sox, 1987 Fleer, 1987 Fleer Update, 1990 Fleer - All-Stars, 2016 Topps Archives - Father/Son Recreates) 

2019 Diamond Jesters Blog Stats

Number of posts: 171
Month with the most posts: 18 posts in October (That's when I upped my weekly output from 3 posts a week to 4 in order to clear a backlog of trade posts.)
Top 5 viewed posts: (Blog views may be down across the board for everyone, but my meager little blog has had 44 posts with over 100 page views this year. Sure, it's probably mostly spam bots and Rico Brogna super-fans, but 100 still means something darn it!)

1. 2019 Obligatory Hall Of Fame Post (397 views)
2. Topps Needs To Stop (286 views)
3. Thinking Exercise, With A Twist (279 views)
4. Time Travel Trading Update #25 (229 views)
5. Repack Haiku #85 (Rico Brogna) (228 views)

Most commented posts: Topps Needs To Stop and Repack Haiku #97 (Terry Pendleton) - And A Contest! - 10 comments each (Nothing brings people together quite like contests and Topps' desire to give us the same old, same old!)
Followers: 49 (Up 7 followers since last time! Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read my little blog!)

My Collection

(Stats courtesy of the Trading Card Database)

Total number of cards: 43,192 (Almost 4,000 cards added from last year (39,281), as always with the caveat that I'm still cataloguing my collection!)
Cards from 2019 sets: 1,268 (A few hundred more than I bought than last year (911). This is also the most I've acquired since I resumed the hobby in 2016!)
Red Sox cards: 3,858 (Over 2,000 more than any other team - I guess I am a team collector at heart!)
Autographed cards: 18 (4 new this year: Wade Boggs, Trot Nixon, Dustin Pedroia and Troy Tulowitzki)

Thanks again, Gavin!

Graded cards: 1 (No new cards this year)
Relic cards: 14 (5 new this year: Hunter Dozier, Francisco Lindor, Manny Ramirez, Fernando Tatis Jr, and Carl Yastrzemski)

Thanks again, Brian!