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

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...
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4232/...71381d8b_b.jpg

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!!!!

Attachment 342243Attachment 342244


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

Attachment 342245

...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???? :rolleyes:), 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?).

I posted this to the other thread, but am reposting here...

I've always thought the 1977-1980 Burger Kings were interesting issues.

Here's some interesting items about Burger King in general I've found that may fill in the missing holes of this issue.

In 1977 there were 175k of each card produced. (I wonder if more were issued in later years and in different markets?)
So 175k x 22 (of each card) = 3,850,000
So if there's 3 cards in a cello pack, that's 1.285 million packs.

How many Piniella's were included? Were some others removed for the Piniella's? (22 is easier to pack in 3's than 23. I did the math. :))

There's only 2 PSA 10's for the BK issue. There's 25 for the Topps issue. Now the 3 card cello packaging tended to damage the cards, but I have to think that's partly because of the short print.

I checked and the average BK serves 846 people daily today. Not sure how many stores there were or how many were in NY or the tri-state area?
In 1970 (the closest year I could find), there were 350 BK stores nationwide.
In 1977 BK had financial issues. My guess is this was just a part of promotions to get people in the stores.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lou-Piniell...53.m2748.l2649 Here is the link to the listing, I hope. He says in the title that they are all #23 and shows the back of one. I would have found it more odd for someone to have 750 1977 Topps #96 Lou Piniella cards rather than 750 1977 Burger King #23 Lou Piniella cards.

There were a number of badly out of register cards in the lot which obviously would have never been distributed at the Burger Kings, which leads me to believe that the cards came directly from the printer source or were saved from the printers dumpster.

That's funny, because in my errors & variations for trade thread, I put a 1977 BK Piniella there with what I called 'wild color shifts.' It looks like it would've been right at home in your picture.

As a 13 year old growing up on Long Island I remember the Burger King cards very well. I seem to remember there being several articles in the main Newspapers (not Hobby Publications) about the Piniella card being rare and the backstory about George being upset that the card wasn't included in the initial issue which led a big jump in price for the card back then. I have the Piniella card in my set but don't know if I got it from Burger King or purchased it at a card show.

Interesting thread. I wonder, what other companies used Topps as a manufacturer for their cards?

K mart, Coke, brighams/coke, Zest soap, Mrs Butterworth, Drakes... among others.


I think the hostess cards were licensed from topps.


The other big producer of small sets, mostly for point of purchase promotion was MSA.

Co branded Topps sets might be a good candidate for a separate thread. Most would likely be post 80,

I do keep a set of the 77 Burger King cards, with the header card and Lou in the back of my 77 Topps set binder

I would guess 90 percent of the plethora of small boxes sets in the 1980's were Topps products? While they seem cheesy today I loved them back then!

Very interesting. Are there any off the top of your head where the front of the cards look exactly the same as the Topps issued cards? Like how the BKs look the same as the Topps issued?

1978 Zest Soap

But not the backs :)

And except for the logo, 84 Nestles. Which may all be sheet cut.


I had order forms for them, but it seemed expensive for a Topps set. The ads and order forms showed normal Topps cards.

Oh, and the 1980 Mrs Butterworth cards were Topps cards in a special pack with a header card.

I haven't seen enough of them out of the pack and provable to know if there are any differences. I had a bunch of packs at one point.

I am not aware of any 1984 Nestle/Topps cards that were released in any way other than in the 132 card sheet. I have several of these sets that were "professionally" cut from the sheets post release, and while 2 of my sets are very nicely cut (better than Topps could in the early to mid 80s) the third is not quite as nicely cut (along the lines of a typical Topps cut job in the 80s).

Thanks all, keep ‘em coming. I’m super obsessed with collecting any Braves cards that looks like Topps. I’ll take a look at them!

No difference on any of the 1980 cards (there were other companies as well) which came in those type of packs. The only difference is the cover card

Interesting wrinkle on the Steinbrenner controversy. I read that Steinbrenner had a fit because Piniella was his son's favorite player, though George liked him a lot too. His son, Hank, is the Yankees CEO now.

I'll have to check when I get home but Yankees yearbooks in 1977-78 might have a list of BK stores in NY metro.

In 1978 BK also produced a nice Yankees poster with drawings of each players headshot. They were give-aways like the cards, quite a few are still around.

Ryan- This hardly news because I'm sure you have it but the 1985 Hostess Braves set was done by Topps.

NY YAnkee
 

talking about Steinbrenner back then, I recall a 80s90s Yankee yearbook in which they messed up the color process..causing George M's face to look terribly red.. Somebody got fired for that ! LOL

I do have it, but I’m always on the look out for something new and off-beat. Thanks for the comment :)

It was either 1980 or 1981 according to google and my memory will go with 1981

Rich

1981 has got to be it, I have multiple copies of the 1980 YB and George's image is fine in all of them.

Whatever year it was, the reason he was ticked off was because it appeared he was wearing lipstick...the team had to go back and reprint them!

George M
 

YES !,
that's what is was...looked like he was wearing lipstick ! LOL