2025 Year In Review

Every year, I have taken a look at how the past year has impacted my collection, and I have decided to  continue again this year and see what changed in 2025! 

2025 Highlights

• The blog has now reached 8 years, and this post here marks my 1,399th post!
  
• The Time Travel Trading Project continues to grow. I've completed a whopping 70 trades this past year, including my 400th Time Travel Trade! That's 11 trades more than the year before, almost an extra trade a month!
• My goal of acquiring the Topps base card of every Red Sox from 1975 onward is coming along quite well! I'm under 65 cards needed now, which is impressive since I wasn't collecting for about 25 years of that time. Now that I'm firmly under 100 cards, I'd like to add some more sets outside of the base and even start working my way back from 1975. I haven't fully decided on any of it though, but the goal is to update it sometime this year.
• I managed to complete 6 sets this year, including my most recent Topps base set since 1990! Along with the 2024 Topps set, I also completed 2024 Topps Holiday and 1988 Leaf sets, as well as the following inserts and small sets: 1996 Fleer Boston Red Sox, 2019 Topps - Mookie Betts Star Player Highlights,  and 1991 Fleer - Pro-Visions Black.

• The sports card collecting community has exploded in my area. Although sadly the shop near where I work closed down last month, another dedicated card shop opened up in my hometown and has already had to move to a larger location. (I never did write up a proper review of the place. I haven't been to the new new location yet, so maybe that should be my excuse...)
• The big development this year however is that for the first time since I've moved to the Shenandoah Valley 20 years ago, a card show took place a town over from me! It was my first card show in about 30 years, and they're already had a second one, with yet another scheduled in March! 

2024 Diamond Jesters Blog Stats

Number of posts: 149 (6 more than last year!))
Month with the most posts: 14 posts in January, March, April, and July (It's good to be consistent!)
Top 5 viewed posts:  I'm doing a little something different this year. As many of my fellow bloggers know, there was a stretch in September where views jumped to unheard of levels. A.I., bot-attacks -  whatever the reason my posts in that short span of a few weeks received the most "views" I had ever had in the history of this blog. So I'm listing two separate Top 5 lists. Here's the official Top 5:

 

1. Two Quick Little Thank Yous (4920) 
2. Comical Erorrs: Ewell Blackwell (3289)
3. Progress Made! (2889)  
4. Repack Haiku #426 (Dave Stieb) (2030) 
5. Going Old School (1882) 

 

All of those were of course from that period in time, where most of the posts reached over 1,000 views. (Unheard of for a small blog like mine!) If we filter out the PED-enhancced posts, I get this unofficial list: 

 

1. Time Travel Trading Update #98 (445) 
2. Time Travel Trading Update #104 (371) 
3. Time Travel Trading Update #101 (347)  
4. Time Travel Trading Update #102 (344)  
5. Time Travel Trading Update #99 (315) 

All Time Travel Trading posts, which makes more sense to me seeing that's my most popular posts. For what it's worth, last year I had 52 posts reach 100 views. This year I had over twice as many, 116. Even outside those weird view totals this was a pleasant development.

Most commented posts: Hitting Half Of A Century! - 17 comments (I guess turning 50 brings out the well-wishers!)
Followers: 77 (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: 52, 059 (This total does not include unopened products or cards from the Time Travel Trading project)

Cards from 2024 sets: 395 (This is a big drop from last year, over 500 cards less. That can be mostly attributed to me completing 2 sets from 2024, but the lack of retail has been a factor too.)

Red Sox cards: 7,258 (Over 400 more than last year's total - I'll take it!)

Autographed cards: 52 (just 1 new this year: Jeff Suppan) 

 

Graded cards: 1 (No new cards this year, not something I actively collect anyway.)

Relic cards: 38 (4 new this year: Eloy Jimenez, Jose Ramirez, Drew Stafford, Jordan Leopold)
 

All in all, 2025 was a great year! Here's hoping for an even better 2026!