After working for a major league team for seven years and seeing the "ball vault" I would not be surprised that older balls would be used in a major league game. I doubt that the guy rubbing up the balls would have cared and I am certain that back then, MLB didn't pay much attention to this either. There would have been nobody that said "these are last years balls, we cannot use them" as they probably got mixed in with the current years shipment in the vault.
This does raise some red flags but I would not be at all surprised that a ball from '89 would be used halfway through the 1990 season.
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