Be careful what you do and say

Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

Newton’s Third Law of Motion says, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

The Bible says in the Old Testament book of Numbers, chapter 32 “be sure your sin will catch up with you.”

Merge them together, and you get the Grossmanism: “Keep your mouth shut and your head down and do your job.”

That’s what happened last week to the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Brewers had just beaten the Cubs in the series-deciding Game 5 of the National Divisional Series at American Family Field to advance on to the league championship series to face the Dodgers.

When the game was over, they celebrated, and they had every right to do so.

They got their team picture taken on the field, and they popped the corks on the champagne bottles waiting for them in their clubhouse.

Nothing is wrong with either of those things.

But in between the traditional team photos and the popping sounds back up the tunnel is where this story takes a bizarre twist.

After the first set of pictures, one of the players saw a fan with a flag near the Brewers dugout. He ran and “borrowed it” for a few minutes, and more pictures were taken with the team that included a few of them holding that flag up for all to see.

It was a white flag with a dark blue “L” on it.

Allow me to share the background story in case you don’t know.

Before mass media arrived on the scene, the operators of the manual scoreboard at Wrigley Field would raise a white flag with a blue “W” on it each afternoon when the Cubs were playing at home and won, and they would raise a dark flag with a white “L” on it when the Cubs lost.

The purpose was that riders on the elevated train system’s Red Line heading home from work would know how the Cubs had done that afternoon.

It’s now one of the best traditions in baseball that when the Cubs win, day or night, they pull out the “W Flag” as the throng sings the 40-year-old song “Go Cubs Go”.

In beating the Cubs and ending their season, the Brewers players were mocking the Cubs.

I thought, at the time, it was not very cool, but I didn’t take it as hard as some Cubs fans did.

It ruffled some feathers!

To be honest, it was an odd gesture from a franchise whose prize tradition is celebrating home runs by having a mascot dressed as a brewmaster slide down a yellow slide and then wave a flag.

But whatever…no sour grapes from me. The Cubs lost, and I kept my head down and my mouth shut.

Then the Brewers proceeded to get swept by the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series in four games. They scored a total of four runs in those four games.

They looked terrible, especially considering this was the team with the best record in the National League.

You may say that the Dodgers are considerably better in this postseason than they were in the regular season, and I think that’s true, and the statistical evidence backs that up.

But there is a segment of America’s sports-loving population that believes strongly that the Brewers’ chances of beating the Dodgers in one game, let alone four times out of seven in a 10-day period, sank when their team’s social media crew posted that picture with the “L” flag in it.

Did the baseball gods show disfavor on them for their taunting of their rivals from down I-94? Maybe. I am not sure how I feel about that concept to begin with.

But you can be 100 percent certain that the Brewers acted like they had crested the highest mountain by taking the fifth and final game of their series with the Cubs.

There can be no doubt that they partied too hard and for too long, forgetting that they still had to win eight more games in the next 14 to reach the actual peak of their profession.

Instead, they got knocked completely off the mountain and were buried by an avalanche of criticism and much-deserved mocking of their own.

No yellow slide was going to ease their fall.

They had acted like fools, and their final destination was fitting.

Their sins had caught up with them, and the pendulum of life had swung back and hit them right in between the eyes and knocked them out.

It’s a lesson for all of us, in sports and in all areas of life, to learn and pass along.

“Keep your mouth shut and your head down and do your job.”