2023 Year In Review

Every year, 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 2023! 

2023 Highlights

• The blog reached 6 years, which included my 1,000th post!
  
• I also reached another milestone - 300 haiku! 
• The Time Travel Trading Project continues to grow. I started the year with 624 cards in the stack. After 61 trades, the stack is now at a whopping 797 cards. (This is even after I had "retired" 38 cards from the project! My trade partners have fed this beast with their generosity, and I am thankful!)
  
• I added two more cards to my Golden Sox Project which puts me at 13 of the 35 cards, or just over 1/3 of the way. I'll keep plugging away at this, but unless prices come way down on the Rafael Devers ASR card, I may not get this complete anytime soon. 
• My goal of acquiring the Topps base card of every Red Sox from 1975 onward is coming along well, I'm under 200 cards needed now, which is impressive since I wasn't collecting for about 25 years of that time. The list should go even faster now that I bought the most valuable of those cards - the 1983 Wade Boggs rookie card.
  
• I finished what is now the oldest complete set in my collection - The 1978 Topps set!

• In addition to that set, I completed/acquired 7 others inserts/sets this year (1987 Fleer - World Series, 1988 Fleer - All-Star Team, 1988 Fleer - Team Stickers, plus 4 other sets that I'll be showing off soon)

2023 Diamond Jesters Blog Stats

Number of posts: 148 (4 less than last year, still in range with what I have been putting out yearly)
Month with the most posts: 14 posts in March and October
Top 5 viewed posts:  Spam-bots aside, I had 37 posts hit the 100 view mark, which seems pretty good to me.

1. Time Travel Trading Update #73 (258) 
2. Random Thoughts And Musings For The Blog's 6th Anniversary (190)
3. Time Travel Trading Update #75 (190)    
4. 2023 World Series Tale Of The Tape (187)
5. Time Travel Trading Update #76 (186) 

Most commented posts: Random Thoughts And Musings For The Blog's 6th Anniversary - 31 comments (Granted, almost half of those were responses to comments from me, but still the 16 that you all wrote still led the field)
Followers: 70 (Who says blogs aren't cool anymore? 4 new followers since last year...)

My Collection

(Stats courtesy of the Trading Card Database)

 

Total number of cards: 45,343 (Just over 1,500 new cards acquired this year, about 500 less  than last year!)

Cards from 2023 sets: 316 (The dip in the amount of new cards continues, thanks to a nice combination of sets getting pushed back, those sets not being available locally, and my general unimpressed feelings about said sets)

Red Sox cards: 6,583 (Exactly 1,000 cards from last year's total - I couldn't plan that if I tried!)

Autographed cards: 44 (11 new this year: Alan Embree, Jeff Gray, Luis Mendoza, Joe Morgan, Ike Delock, Jim Marshall, Carl Pavano, Jason Varitek, Mike Maddux, Rich Gedman, Rico Petrocelli) 

 

Graded cards: 1 (No new cards this year)

Relic cards: 23 (4 new this year: Curt Schilling, Nomar Garciaparra/Pedro Martinez, Hideo Nomo, Johnny Damon)

 

All in all, 2023 was a great year! Here's hoping for an even better 2024!