Sandy Koufax is a former left-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball
who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers
from 1955 to 1966. He is best known for his string of six amazing
seasons from 1961 to 1966 before arthritis ended his career at the age
of 31. A notoriously difficult pitcher to hit against, he was the
first major leaguer to pitch more than three no-hitters, the first to
allow fewer than seven hits per nine innings pitched over his career,
and the first to strike out more than nine batters per nine innings
pitched in his career. Among National League pitchers with at least
2000 innings pitched who have debuted since 1913, he has both the
highest career winning percentage (.655) and the lowest career earned
run average (2.76); his 2396 career strikeouts ranked seventh in major
league history upon his retirement, and trailed only Warren Spahn's
total of 2583 among left-handers. Retiring virtually at the peak of
his career, Koufax later became–at age 36–the youngest person ever
elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Koufax
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1683:
Great Turkish war: Polish troops led by Jan III Sobieski joined forces
with an Habsburg army to defeat the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of
Vienna.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna)
1933:
Leó Szilárd conceived of the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd)
1942:
The Laconia incident: RMS Laconia, carrying some 80 civilians and 268
British soldiers, and about 1800 Italian POWs with 160 Polish soldiers
on guard, was struck by a torpedo from a U-boat off the coast of West
Africa and sank.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident)
1977:
South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was killed in police
custody.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Biko)
1992:
Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla organization
Shining Path, was captured in Lima.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_Path)
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Wikiquote of the day:
"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error
is identical with the discovery of the truth — that error and truth
are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world
turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply
another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." -- H. L.
Mencken
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken)