Because the game of baseball is played differently nowadays at the major league level, it is more difficult for pitchers to accumulate as many opportunities for wins as they once could.

Starting pitchers one hundred years ago pitched once every three games, for instance. Now, they pitch every fifth game or so. The greatest starters in the most recent era each accumulated about 350 or so career victories. Thus, Cy Young’s career baseball achievement of 511 victories looks like a schoolboy’s scribbled fantasy. Walter Johnson’s second place record of 417 also looks superhuman.

On this date in 1910, Cy Young (above) won his third game of the season; it was his 500th career win. There is a reason why the two annual awards for pitcher of the year are named the “Cy Young” awards.
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John Glenn (above) is 95 today. The last member of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronaut corps, he is also the oldest living former U.S. Senator, and—with his October 1998 mission as a payload specialist on Discovery mission STS-95 at age 77—he remains the oldest person to have traveled in space.

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Douglas Corrigan was supposed to fly from Brooklyn, New York, to California on July 17, 1938. However, he probably always intended to fly in the opposite direction, to Europe, taking his self-built plane on a solo transatlantic flight. (His plane had been rejected for a cross-ocean flight because it was deemed not flight-worthy for such a long trip with no place to land in case of emergency.)
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The Boeing 747-131 carried registration N93119 and it was 15 years old. In those 15 years, it completed 16,869 flights and was in the air 93,000 hours. Twenty years ago today, it landed uneventfully at JFK Airport from Athens, Greece. That was flight 16,869.

Later that same day, as the sun was setting, it took off for its 16,870th flight. It was TWA Flight 800 to Rome, Italy, and it exploded at about 15,000 feet altitude over the Atlantic Ocean just south of Smith Point on Long Island. Everyone on board was killed, 212 passengers and 18 crew.

A sanctuary and park, the TWA Flight 800 International Memorial, was built and dedicated next to Smith Point County Park in 2004. It is depicted at top.
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