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 _______________________________ 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) _____________________ 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)