Thorn: Shoeless Mike Landmann, and no-hitters in pro debuts
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on January 12, 2016:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The newspaper account reported that he “found the shoes lent him were too irritating and he deliberately took them off after the first inning,” playing the “last eight innings in his stocking feet.” But the phenom in question was not Joe Jackson (or Joe Hardy, of Damn Yankees) but instead Michael Joseph Landmann, whose shoelessness was the least startling thing about his professional baseball debut.
You are not likely to have heard of Shoeless Mike for he never cracked a big-league box score. But all he did in this first game in Organized Baseball was to toss a no-hitter, a feat never accomplished before and, to my knowledge, only once since. {See bracketed comment below.] The New York Tribune reported, on the day after the contest of August 30, 1888.
<snip>
Where does his no-hit debut fit into baseball history? Attempts to document equivalent firsts might include Pud Galvin’s perfect game (history’s first) of August 17, 1876 at a tournament in Ionia, Michigan. He pitched for the St. Louis Red Stockings, a professional club not admitted into the National League. But the eighteen-year-old Galvin had pitched to a 4-2 record for the same club when it was in the National Association of 1875, and his perfecto in 1876 was not his first start of that year.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2016/01/12/the-shoeless-one/
Originally published: January 12, 2016. Last Updated: January 12, 2016.