It Had to Be Lou...1977 Burger King #23 Lou Piniella

[JollyElm]

For those of us growing up in the New York area, 1977 was a huge year for baseball as Chris Chambliss sent 'The Bombers' to the Series the previous fall after a long absence. And, are you kidding me, now they added Reg-gie to that great squad????!!!!! When Burger King told us we could get free Yankees cards with every meal, it was a kid's dream...even for us Mets fans. They handed you a couple every time you sat down to wolf down a Whopper, and you didn't keep them separate from the thousands of 1977 Topps cards you were already amassing. Nope, you just added them to your Yankees section (we all assembled our cards by team, not by number) and the beautiful thing was there was now an actual card of Reggie Jackson wearing pinstripes that replaced the horrible airbrushed headshot of the regular Topps card. Awesome!! There were slight cropping differences and whatnot (Thurman Munson with no all star stripe) in some of the cards, and other player(s) were pictured for the first time as Yankees (as opposed to their Topps card counterparts), but the only real difference was the numbers on back. For our purposes, the phantom Lou Piniella card was number 23, not the #96 of the Topps set, even though it looked exactly the same on front. But, just like almost everyone else on the planet, my family, friends and I never got a Lou Piniella in a actual Burger King pack inside of a restaurant and never even knew they even existed until many years later. Some locations actually issued them, though, as a couple of members here have said that is where they got theirs, in a Burger King pack. So, 1977 BK #23 Lou Piniella became highly sought after.

These are some of mine...


There has always been a bit of a fascination with the key card to the 1977 Burger King Yankees set, #23 Lou Piniella, and it has always left collectors asking, "Why is it so hard to find???" But is that sucker STILL tough to find?? Cliff Bowman posted these amazing photos of what appears to show 750, yes seven-hundred-and-fricking-fifty, 1977 BK Lou Piniella cards!!!!

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He also posted this miscut Piniella (an enlargement of the initial pic) with another piece of a Piniella card beside it...

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...which suggests that full sheets of BK Piniellas alone were printed by Topps to be distributed late in the process to participating Burger King restaurants (geez, I sound like a commercial).

***To play devil's advocate and keep this entirely on the up and up, we can't see all the backs of the Piniella cards in the rubber band (ouch!!) photos, so they are not 'proven' to be BK cards. And the miscut card could possibly be from a regular BK print sheet from that year (with the cards of the other players positioned on the selfsame sheet). However, number one, there is no reason in heck to doubt Cliff (BTW, since I'm mentioning you so may times times, why didn't you start this thread???? ), and as far as print sheets go, think horses not zebras. It is much more likely IMHO that because of common sense, Lou Piniella was added to the set late and was most likely printed in quantity alone.***

The popular thinking was that the set was printed without the inclusion of Lou Piniella, and after George Steinbrenner complained loudly to the powers that be, it was added as card #23. Were they mass produced on their own, with many ending up piled together somewhere in storage? With Cliff's pic, I'd have to think yes. I don't see anyone with a 750 card pile of Mike Torrez anywhere.

Here a couple of random articles regarding the 1977 Burger King Yankees set...

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...ear-promotion/

http://gothamist.com/2008/08/31/the_...wentythird.php

Here's a proposed timeline of events that I created (and cut and pasted from another thread in the B/S/T section):
1. Burger King starts issuing Yankees cards (a 22 card set plus checklist - no Lou Piniella)
2. George 'The Boss' Steinbrenner complains to BK/Topps, outraged that his favorite player wasn't included in the set (paraphrasing from Sparky Lyle's brief account in "The Bronx Zoo")
3. Topps prints (sheets of only?) Piniella cards and...
4. BK releases #23 cards in packs in some specific areas of the tri-state area (wow, I just realized that all states except for Maine, Hawaii and Alaska could be part of a tri-state area, but I digress) in the waning days of the promotion

So if you have anything to add to the topic or want to show your Piniellas, feel free to chime in. I think the main question remains, how rare are the #23 cards? I mean, let's say hundreds or thousands of 1933/34 Goudey Lajoies suddenly appeared (but weren't actually for sale anywhere), would they ever be considered easy to find?? Would those cards still be considered 'rare'? (Please no 'scarce' vs. 'rare' debates.) There are only a couple of Piniellas here and there available on ebay (an OC-looking PSA 7 was recently sold, probably to a member here?).