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Player Giveaways
It's entirely plausible that some of the vast Topps transparency archives wound up in player hands. As I recall, there was a letter from former National League infielder Dick Gray asking for exactly that - and it was included in his file to explain the fact that the volume of images was smaller than what would be expected.
But it seems highly unlikely that even Sy would give away an entire shoot's worth of images to a player. Firstly, why would you want six or seven nearly identical pictures of yourself? Secondly, those images were not archived just for the hell of it. The out-of-date negatives were kept in case a baseball figure returned to his old team. That, for instance, is how Topps happened to have a picture of Gil Hodges in a Mets uniform, at their St. Petersburg spring training site, ready to be used in the first series of their 1968 cards, production of which had begun in October, 1967, in time to be released just as camps opened that year. Topps had shot Hodges with the Mets in 1963 - and kept at least one negative in the file.
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