2021 Year In Review

For the past 4 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 2021!

2021 Highlights

• The blog hit the big 0-4 this year, which just amazes me. I'd honestly didn't think I'd last this long.
• Part of the reason I didn't think I'd last is because I thought I'd run out of things to post. I started up my Repack Haiku series to force myself to have at least one thing a week. This year I posted my 200th haiku (which also happened to introduce a guest blogger submission!)...that's a lot of poetry!
  
• After the success of my first April Fools Day prank, I upped the ante and followed up with a blogging community scavenger hunt! It went quite well I must say, thanks to the participation of 31 of my fellow bloggers!
  
• The Time Travel Trading Project has just exploded in scope! There's close to 400 cards in the stack now, all thanks to a whopping 59 trades! That's almost 5 trades every month! 
• Among those trades was one that netted me the oldest card I've ever held in hand - a 1890 Sweet Caporal Actors & Actresses card of young silent film actress Frankie Raymond!
  
  
  
• Many of those trades came through the TCDB. I only made half as many trades this year as I did last year, but between the TCDB and the Time Travel Trading Project, I made over 70 trades this year - easily a new high for me!
  
• My Golden Sox Project only saw one addition to it this year, giving me 9 out of 31 gold parallels of the 2018 Boston Red Sox from the 2018 Topps base and update sets. I'll have to work on that this year!
  
• I completed 7 sets/inserts in 2021, the biggest two being the oldest set I ever completed and my first Canadian set! (1992 Manning 1919 Black Sox Reprints, 2020 Topps Boston Red Sox, 1990 Fleer - League Standouts, 1981 Topps, 1989 Fleer - For The Record, 1992 Donruss - Rod Carew Puzzle, 1992 O-Pee-Chee Premier) 

2021 Diamond Jesters Blog Stats

Number of posts: 146 (After averaging 173 posts/year for the past 3 years, I've dipped to my lowest total since 2017 when I first started blogging. No cards on shelves means less things to talk about I guess. Here's hoping I'm back to my normal amount this year.)
Month with the most posts: 13 posts each month from March to July. For contrast, I did 18 posts in January 2020.
Top 5 viewed posts:  As I mentioned above, my Time Travel Trading Project has gotten huge, and the views back this up! Also, it's good to see the spam-bots are back, as I had 44 posts with over 100 views.

1. Time Travel Trading Update #49 (279 views)
   
2. Time Travel Trading Update #54 (262 views)
   
3. Time Travel Trading Update #55 (260 views)
   
4. Breaking Good - Cardboard Collections (240 views)
5. Time Travel Trading Update #52 (237 views)

Most commented posts: Scavenger Hunt: Where They Were - 12 comments (Technically a few Time Travel posts had more, but my responses accounted for a good portion of the tally.)
Followers: 60 (After gaining 11 followers last year, I gained zero this year. I know it's not the ideal way to gauge my viewership, but I was kind of hoping for at least one or two more.)

My Collection

(Stats courtesy of the Trading Card Database)

 

Total number of cards: 45,678 (In a time when cards weren't plentiful on the shelves, I still managed to add almost 800 cards to the collection - not bad!)

Cards from 2021 sets: 623 (This is up from last year, but still down from what I did in previous years - stupid flippers...)

Red Sox cards: 5,273 (At some point over the year, I cleared the 5,000 threshold! No other team has reached 2,000)

Autographed cards: 30 (7 new this year: David Murphy, Kevin Millar, Charlie Zink, Ryan Kalish, Aneudis Mateo, Kelly Shoppach, and Shannon Stewart) 

Graded cards: 1 (No new cards this year)

Relic cards: 21 (3 new this year: David Ortiz, David Price, Daniel Bard)

Thanks again, Oren!

At least from a collecting standpoint, 2021 was a decent year. I'm looking forward to what 2022 might bring!