1983 NST Album

A company called NST produced four sets of baseball cards between 1975 and 1983.  Well, I say "baseball cards" but technically what they really were were stickers or stamps that were meant to be pasted into albums.  While I had a number of the cards from the first sets, I didn't have any from the last one, nor did I have any of the albums.  Until a little over a month ago.

I picked up a partial 1983 set that was pasted into the album.  I haven't actually counted it up, but I'd estimate I've got about half of the 288 cards.  The album itself is too large to fit in my scanner, so I took a couple pictures:

Front Cover

Back Cover

pp 24-25

The album has 32 pages total.  Despite the album being too big for my scanner, I did some scans to show some of the pages in more detail.

The first bunch of pages has groups of cards for the same players - for example there's eight cards of Tatsunori Hara (cards #19-26), followed by eight cards of Suguru Egawa, five cards of Shoji Sadaoka, etc.  These cards not only show them in uniform, but some show them in street clothes or their high school or college team.

Suguru Egawa (p 5)

Kiyoshi Nakahata (bottom of p. 8)

There's a page for the two foreign players (Reggie Smith and Hector Cruz) as well.  I think that's one of the Lee brothers with Smith on card #81.

Smith & Cruz (p. 10)

There's a page dedicated to the manager and coaching staff - I have the cards for both the manager Motoshi Fujita and head coach Sadaharu Oh but sadly I did not get the card for obscure Hall Of Famer Shigeru Makino (card #198).

Manger & Coaches (top of p. 22)

There's a page for OB Giants - I got the cards for Masaichi Kaneda, Shigeru Takada, Shozo Doi, Roy White, Masahiko Mori and John Sipin but not the ones for Tetsuharu Kawakami, Tatsuro Hirooka, Isao Harimoto or Yukinobu Kuroe.

OB Giants (p. 16)

There's another page with 10 cards for Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh.

ON (p.17)

There's a two page spread (pp. 18-19) dedicated to spring training.  It looks to me like some of these pictures might have been taken in the US - there's a lot of English on the billboards.  The Giants did spring training in Vero Beach in 1981 so these might be pictures from that.  Google didn't have any information on any other times the Giants came to the US but I can't rule out that these might be from Hawaii, Arizona or even Australia.

Spring Training (p. 18)

Spring Training (p. 19)

There was another two page spread (pp. 20-21) that Engel's guide labels as "Players Relaxed".  The first page shows a lot of candids of the players in street clothes while the second page looks like promotions at the ballpark.  Here's the bottom of each page:

Players Relaxed (bottom of p. 20)

Players Relaxed (bottom of p. 21)

There's a page at the end of the album that I think is some sort of redemption page.  It looks like if you got 40 of these little Giants stickers, you could send the page in for some sort of gift.  Sadly, the previous owner only got 38 of them.

Redemption Page (p 32)