Thank you, gentlemen, all the responses so far are much appreciated.
We're quite sure now that the illustration was executed by an artist not fully conversant with baseball
and who failed to use much reference material. Someone in the art department should've caught
the anachronistic details.
While doing more of our own research in the interim since we first posted, we do have a "no older than" date.
Some deep sleuthing of an obscure reference made in passing in the text on the backside establishes the thing
as having been published no earlier than 1908 and possibly/probably some few years later.
What intrigued us was the vendor's guess that the piece dated to 1900 or earlier, which to our inexpert eyes
didn't jibe with the chest protectors and birdcage masks on the catcher and ump, nor with the general look of
the batter's uni. We'd still be interested in learning more details about the advent of the protective gear shown,
like whether any of it would have been in use as early as 1908.
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