Florida Project Addendum

I wanted to do a quick coda to my post about completing the subset from the 1974/75 Calbee set showing the Yomiuri Giants at Vero Beach for spring training in 1975.  Calbee was not the only card company to include cards showing the Giants in Florida - NST did too.  Unfortunately I can't say for sure how many such cards there are in the set.

If you're not familiar with NST, they issued four sets of baseball cards between 1975 and 1983.  Although to be completely accurate, they issued four sets of baseball "stamps" that were intended to be pasted into books.  Their first set - the one from 1975 - was entitled "Mr. Baseball" and was centered on Shigeo Nagashima.  A large number of the cards in the set featured Nagashima's recently completed playing career as well as his first season as the Giants' manager.  Other cards featured the players on the 1975 Giants as well as stars (and managers) of other teams.

I haven't seen all the cards in the set but I think there are two sections of the checklist that include photos that were taken in Florida in the spring of 1975.  I don't have all of these cards but I found a number of them over at COMC.  It'll be pretty obvious which are which.

The first section is cards #182 to #191 which appear to mostly be photos of Nagashima during spring training both in Japan and Florida.  This card is one of the exceptions which shows the Giants players lined up on a baseline.  It resembles the photo on the 1974/75 Calbee card #694 which was taken at Daytona City Island Ballpark although I don't think this one was taken there.  The caption for this card in the stamp booklet for the set says that this photo is from Vero Beach although I don't think those captions are always accurate.

#186

This next card features Nagashima with Stan Wasiak, the manager of the Dodgers' Triple-A team in Albuquerque at the time.  The caption in the stamp book implies that this is Dodger manager Walt Alston but that's not correct - Alston wore #24 not #75.  That's Giants catcher Takashi Yoshida (#9) lurking in the background.

#188

This next card is one of my favorites.  It features Nagashima and Expos manager Gene Mauch starting to exchange hats.  The text in the stamp book again implies that this is Walt Alston again but it clearly is not.

#189

Gary Engel had labelled this as Gene Mauch in his checklist but I always wondered if it really was him.  But a few months back I was spelunking through SABR's photo archive and I came across this which confirmed it:

The final card from this section of the checklist shows Nagashima talking to uniformed person wearing a blue coat.  The stamp booklet does not identify the other person.  The card looks very similar to the 1974/75 Calbee card #713 although it is not the same photo.

#190

Engel lists the other person as Jack McKeon, who was the manager of the Kansas City Royals at the time, although he adds a "?" to indicate that he's not sure.  I don't know why Gary decided it was McKeon although I don't see anything obvious to confirm it one way or another.  It'd be kind of ironic if it turned out that the one time NST didn't claim it was Walt Alston with Nagashima, it turned out that he was.

The other section of the checklist that has photos taken in Florida is cards #224 to #239.  I'm fairly certain that not all of these cards do but here are the ones that I've seen that I think were.  The first one features an American player who is instantly recognizable to anyone who was a baseball fan in the 1970's (or reads the Night Owl regularly);

#224 Tsuneo Horiuchi/Ron Cey

BTW - I sent the Night Owl a copy of this card a few years ago so he's already aware it exists.

 

Here's the rest of the cards:

#226 Sadaharu Oh

#227 Toshimitsu Suetsugu

#229 Isao Shibata

#230 Shozo Doi

#234 Kazumi Takahashi

#235 Shigeru Kobayashi w/coach Yukinori Miyata

#236 Yoshimasa Takahashi

#239 Shitoshi Sekimoto

A couple of comments on these cards:

• If you look at the background of Shibata's card, you'll see a bunch of Atlanta Braves players in the dugout
• I briefly got excited that there was a Pittsurgh Pirates player in the background of Doi's card as it looked like there was a guy with an afro wearing a yellow hat on the far right of the card.  After closer examination I realized that what I thought was a hat on top of a bushy head of hair was actually the arm of a player just out of frame - you can see that player's shin in the bottom right of the photo.  Everything lined up just right that it looked like that arm made up the head of the player in the background.
• It was only while I was researching this post that I realized that the Shigeru Kobayashi card was from this set.  I had thought it was from the JCM 2003 set that I wrote about recently.

These and the Calbee cards are all the ones I know of from the Giants' visit to Vero Beach in 1975.  I don't know of any from their 1981 visit - I had previously thought some of the cards from the 1983 NST set were from Florida but they're actually from Guam, where the team did spring training that year.