Jonathan, that may very well be the case, and we actually hope your surmise is correct.
Among the roughly forty baseball-themed dexterity games catalogued, only four are known
to have been made before about 1910, the oldest dating to 1889. However, it's always perilous
to ascribe a date to a game based on artwork -- the more crude the artwork the more unreliable the estimate.
Just one among dozens of examples: based
solely on the uniform illustrated on this game,
what year of manufacture would most of us put to it?:
bbNationalGameOfBaseBallTMcLoughlin01ax.jpg