Mitch Powitz

Teacher, dad, husband, guitar player, Ex-baseball coach, Ex-small business owner, stock market junkie, sports fan and generally all around good guy.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On June 3, 1888, the San Francisco Examiner buried a baseball poem on page 4, between the editorials and the weather.

The author was so embarrassed by it that he refused to sign his real name. The byline just said "Phin."

He was reportedly paid five dollars. Nobody noticed it. No reviews, no reprints, nothing. The poem appeared to die the same day it was born.

Then, two months later, came one of the strangest accidents in entertainment history.

A famous stage actor named DeWolf Hopper was performing at Wallack's Theatre in New York. The audience that night happened to include players from two professional baseball teams, and Hopper needed something baseball themed to win them over. A friend handed him a torn newspaper clipping from some West Coast paper.

Hopper memorized it that afternoon and recited it on stage that night:

"The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day..."

The crowd went insane.

Hopper would go on to perform "Casey at the Bat" more than 10,000 times over the next 47 years. It became the most famous poem in American sports history. It is still performed, parodied and quoted 138 years later. Mighty Casey striking out is permanent American mythology.

And the author? Ernest Thayer, a Harvard philosophy grad who took the newspaper job as a favor to his college friend William Randolph Hearst, thought the poem was garbage. He never copyrighted it. He never made another dollar from it. For years he wouldn't even confirm he wrote it, while multiple frauds stepped forward claiming they did.

Five dollars for the most quoted thing ever written about baseball.

[Boston Radio Watch®️ @bostonradio]

44 years ago today, June 3, 1982, students at Ridgemont High were taking/cheating on their final exams.

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”(1982).

[Dan Wilkins Broadcasting @DWBroadcasting]

Logan Sowa opened the scoring with an RBI single

MID 1
Toms River South 1
Delsea 0

[Dan Wilkins Broadcasting @DWBroadcasting]

Time to turn a bracket on its' head!

⚾️TOMS RIVER SOUTH vs DELSEA
🏆SJ Group 3 Semifinal
⏰3:00pm
🎙️Dan Wilkins, Greg Himes
📺https://t.co/9R1iYhdQMi

#DWBroadcasting

[TR South Baseball ⚾️ @TRS_Baseball]

GAME DAY ⚾️🏹
NJSIAA
South Jersey - Group 3
Semifinals

SOUTH vs DELSEA

🆚 The Crusaders
⏰ 3:00pm
📍 Delsea Regional High School

#southbaseball #hittingindians

@JimRank10 @JSSInsider @Matt_Manley

[Darren Rovell @darrenrovell]

This Day In 1925: Lou Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp in the lineup and played 14 straight years.

Pipp, who had a headache, was made an example of. Don’t be Wally Pipp. Show up every day or you could be replaced forever.

The story that has been told for a century isn’t true.

👇

[The Rolling Stones @RollingStones]

Thinking of you on your birthday Charlie, you are so missed 💛

[MLB @MLB]

The @WhiteSox pulled off an EXTREMELY rare play last night 😯

There haven't been two 3-6 putouts on the same play since June 26, 1972!

[Rich Condon @RichardPCondon]

For anyone who might’ve forgotten the cause of the Civil War, Ulysses Grant made it clear to US troops on June 2, 1865 who “maintained the supremacy of the Union and the Constitution... and of the proclamation forever abolishing slavery, the cause and pretext of the rebellion.”

[Keith Richards @officialKeef]

It's Charlie's birthday! Missing him!

[Robert Talisse @RobertTalisse]

"In the Park" - Ramones. A long time fave from the first Ramones album I ever bought. *Subterranean Jungle* came out shortly after my 13th birthday, I bought it with the $10 I got from my grandmother....

[Jersey Baseball Nation @NJCollegeBSBNat]

Guy gives 28 years of his life to the school, you drop a press release in the middle of NCAA Regionals Championship Monday. That's embarrassing. @PUTigerBaseball do better.

[TR South Baseball ⚾️ @TRS_Baseball]

Lets eat!!! ⚾️🏹🍝

Thanks to @Matt_Manley, @JSSInsider and Joe Leone's Italian Specialties for the Week 9 recognition...

@JimRank10

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

252 years ago today, the British Empire closed the busiest port in North America to teach one colony a lesson, and accidentally turned thirteen colonies into one country.

On December 16, 1773, a few dozen Bostonians had thrown 342 chests of East India Company tea into the harbor. The damages came to roughly £9,659. Lord North, the Prime Minister, decided to make an example. Parliament passed the Boston Port Act. King George III signed it on March 31, 1774. It took effect at dawn on June 1.

The Royal Navy moved warships into Boston Harbor and dropped anchor. Every dock was sealed. No ship could enter or leave. Not a barrel of flour, not a load of firewood, not a letter. The port would stay closed until Boston paid the East India Company in full and promised to behave.

The intent was to isolate Massachusetts and force her neighbors to watch her starve.

What happened instead is one of the strangest political miracles in modern history.

Down in Williamsburg, a 31 year old burgess named Thomas Jefferson and a few friends, including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, pulled a dusty old book off the shelf of the House of Burgesses library, a record of how the Long Parliament had once handled a tyrant, and proposed that the entire colony of Virginia observe June 1, 1774 as a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" in solidarity with Boston.

The Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the House two days later for treason. The burgesses simply walked across the street to the Raleigh Tavern and kept meeting.

June 1 came. In Virginia, every Anglican church was draped in black. The bells tolled all day. Plantation owners shut their doors. Jefferson wrote later that "the effect of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity."

The same shock ran through every colony south of New England. Wagon trains of food started rolling toward Boston from as far away as Charleston. The Marblehead fishermen offered to give the Boston merchants the use of their docks for free. A Quaker miller in Pennsylvania sent a hundred barrels of flour. Israel Putnam personally drove a herd of sheep from Connecticut to feed the city.

Three months later, 56 delegates from twelve colonies sat down together in Philadelphia. It was called the First Continental Congress. None of them had ever met under one roof before.

Parliament wanted to punish a city. It created a nation.

252 years ago today, in a harbor full of Royal Navy frigates, the American Revolution stopped being a Massachusetts problem.

[Mitch Powitz @powitz]

@BarryRoland19 At our friends house - My wife got locked in a second floor bathroom & emergency key didn’t work. We had to pass tools under the door to take the hinges off 😂😂

[Mitch Powitz @powitz]

@RobertTalisse Maybe the department head can arrange free parking? 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Robert Talisse @RobertTalisse]

Happy Monday. "Fish" - The Damned. I miss Brian James

[Jackie Singh @HackingButLegal]

Your 401(k) is about to become Elon Musk's exit liquidity

[Lawrence McDonald @Convertbond]

Important read, high impact on your 401k:

https://t.co/HEmmJRJ8ct

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Imagine you spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing.

You opened a 401k at 23. You contributed every paycheck. You ignored the noise. You bought the index because Bogle told you to, because Buffett told you to, because every honest piece of financial advice for 30 years told you the index was the safest, most diversified, most rules-based way to own America.

The whole point was the rules.

The rules said: a company must trade for 12 months before joining the S&P 500. The rules said: it must show four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability. The rules existed because in 1999 the index quietly bought a lot of stocks at the top, and pensioners paid the bill.

After the dot-com crash, S&P tightened the rules. Nasdaq tightened the rules. FTSE Russell tightened the rules.

For 23 years, those rules held.

Then SpaceX filed for IPO.

And the rules changed.

The S&P 500 waived the profitability requirement. Nasdaq cut its trading-history window from 90 days to 15. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the major index funds will absorb between 19% and 24% of SpaceX's float within six months. That's over $30 trillion of passive 401k and retirement money, mechanically buying a single newly public company at IPO valuations, because the rules said they had to.

Except the rules used to say they didn't.

Here's the thought exercise:

If you spend 40 years building a system designed to protect ordinary savers from buying overpriced stocks, and then you waive the protections the moment a sufficiently large stock asks you to, what was the system actually protecting?

Most of investing is about understanding what's a rule and what's a guideline.

A rule binds the rule-maker.

A guideline binds the saver.

You're allowed to find out which is which only after the fact.