Tom,
Someone wrote to me a while back about the origin of these pins. I did not and still don't know their origin. A good clue is the story of how they were sold by a street vendor outside the ball park. They are definitely unlicensed. Pinbacks will bedevil you with their arcane creations. I don't recall ever seeing a Yankee player in this pin design. That is not all that surprising given the Yankees were a very mediocre team in those years.
I would disagree with you about them having been shot in a studio. It seems extremely unlikely to me that whoever commissioned these pins could convince MLB players to visit a studio (and bring their uniform) to create illegal merchandise. By the 1970s considerable progress had been made in creating "layered" images, i.e., placing a carefully cropped picture of a player on top of a synthetically created background. The bright white spots around some players appear to be artificially created.
Someone who might help with the mystery of these pins would be the photograph (or maybe card) collectors. If those images were not shot in a studio, they came from somewhere. I think the creator of these pins had these photographs, cropped and layered them in a photo studio, and then found a pin making company to produce them.
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