The Hot Corner 2016 Goals

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a safe night, as mine was pretty unforgettable. I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to discuss some of my hobby related goals for 2016, so what better way to kick off the new year then overwhelm myself with new tasks and goals.

Image Source

- First and foremost, I will be leaving the country and spending the next four months roaming across Europe with one of my best friends. This is through a study abroad program my college offers, and I can honestly say I've never been more excited for anything in my life. It's going to be a fantastic opportunity, and my primary goal of the year is to make the trip as worthwhile as can be. If this trip affects the following goals listed, so be it. Opportunities like this are once in a lifetime, and I'm going to live it up. I plan on still blogging while I'm away, but I don't know how often or what I will get to share with you quite yet.

- As of now, I am primarily collecting any and all Joe Panik cards. I currently have 23 unique cards of his, and I'd like to add 37 more by year's end. This will bring me to a total of 60 different cards. Of the 37, I will strive for 10 autographs and 5 relic cards.

- I also started collecting any licensed Luis Severino cards in August, and I was able to collect 39 different cards (8 autographs) of the young Yankees hurler. By the end of 2016, I'm going to attempt to add 61 more cards for a grand total of 100. Of the 61, I will try for 8 more autographs and 4 relics.

- I'm going to make my best effort to go to the National in Atlantic City with my Dad over the summer, depending on how I'm doing financially after my trip abroad. It would be great to get to see William, Frankie, and possibly meet Andrew!

- At the moment I have 21 different Hall of Fame signed baseballs. In 2015, I added 3 to my collection over the summer (Brooks Robinson, Al Kaline, & Eddie Murray). Next year, I'm going to try for 4 more balls, which would put me at 25 in total.

- My Mickey Mantle signed 16x20 photo currently bears 56 signatures and does not have room for many more. In 2015, I added Tino Martinez, Tim Raines, Don Larsen, and Jim Leyritz at MAB's Pinstripe Pandemonium. With limited space left, I only want to add quality names to the photo at this point. We're going to shoot for 2 more in 2016.

- The Ten for Tuesday series didn't necessarily take off as much as I wanted it to when I first introduced it in April, but I had a fun time doing them when I had time to kill. I originally wanted to do it every week, but well, school. I'm going to try to do one list per month.

- I want to cover more baseball related topics as was mentioned in my Year in Review post last night. Similar to last year, I want to discuss my Hall of Fame ballot and preview the upcoming season division by division. One of my favorite parts of 2015 was going back to my original predictions and seeing just how horrible of a job I did. Maybe I'll improve next year. Maybe.

- I'm going to continue contributing to my school's newspaper with posts about baseball. I would cover the school's Varsity Athletics, but I don't think that would be a simple task from the other side of the world. Instead, another big goal of mine is to land an internship for next summer. There's a local newspaper that I would especially like to work with, and hopefully that can give me a better taste of the journalism world.

- I want to figure out how to further market my blog and possibly begin using Adsense. Now that I've purchased my own domain, it would be nice to be able to make enough money to pay for the annual fees of maintaining the site. In addition, I would like to at least add 100 more followers on Twitter, since that has become the primary way I've been able to share my posts within the community.

- My final goal is to continue to build off of all the great friendships I've made through this community and get to know more of you! I absolutely love the group that we've developed through Blogger over the years, and while some sites may come and go there are still quite a few mainstays. This will be my 8th full year on Blogger and my 9th year blogging. Time really does fly.

I look forward to the possibility of another fantastic year! Now, it's time to open up eBay and get cracking. This could be dangerous.

PS: I would greatly appreciate if you can all add this new link to your blogroll and remove "drewscards"! This blog transition has been planned for a while but I was always worried about losing my readership in the process. I'd like to make this move as seamless as I can, and anything you can do to spread the word would mean a lot! Thank you!