Although not completely responsive to your question, the following discussion is interesting and may shed light(note the remarks on Denny Sullivan):
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=1440608
It seems the E97 B&W cards that some consider proofs would have predated the color version, and that these have a couple of players captioned with 1908 teams, including Young. The Young B&W card depicts him with Boston N.L., where Irv played in 1908. Although the caption on the B&W says Cy, remember that Irv was sometimes called Young Cy or variations thereof. My guess is when the cards were first colorized, they originally carried over this team designation, even though the issuer intended the real Cy Young to be in the set and therefore checklisted him with Cleveland. Seeing that the front and back team designations did not match, they corrected the error and had another printing that used the same erroneous depiction but which changed the caption to Cleveland. The same appears to have happened with the cards of Simon Nichols, and Sullivan was intended to be Billy but instead showed Denny. That's one theory anyway.
So you can look at the card as Cy Young with an erroneous front, or as Irv Young with an erroneous back. 
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Last edited by nolemmings; 02-19-2018 at 02:39 PM.
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