Posted by David Wade on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 7:42 pm

I awoke Tuesday morning at about 1:00 a.m. EST, to the sound of a vomiting dog.

I stumbled out of bed as quickly as I could to get her outside.  Once in the backyard, she happily wandered around for a few minutes, seemed fit, so I let her back in.  Back upstairs, I cleaned the regurgitated mess in a sleep-induced haze.  Once finished with that, I decided to check live scoring for my fantasy baseball team.  That’s where I found out the cause of my dog’s illness.

Kevin Gregg.

Apparently my 12 year old lab mix saw the results of Gregg’s 9th inning Monday night against the Padres.  I assumed that was the cause, for the moment I saw the results of Gregg’s 9th inning Monday night against the Padres, I felt a wave of nausea wash over my own body and started gagging like Lloyd did when he saw his best friend Harry with Mary Swanson. 

Gregg’s own gag reflex came at a most inopportune time for both the Chicago Cubs and my fantasy baseball team.  The former, still a very talented ball club, has to start winning now or face yet another off-season trying to figure out what went wrong.  The latter are not a great team, but a week or two of really good pitching could catapult my squad into previously unseen heights for me this late in a season. 

Did I mention Ted Lilly started for me Monday and Gregg’s meltdown blew the win for him (and me)?

I stumbled back to bed wishing I had never decided to check the internet in the first place and my disgust made it difficult to fall back asleep, to say the least.  Exhausted the next morning, I pulled up to my son’s preschool and realized I forgot his backpack and lunch and had to drive back home in the now horrible traffic I had beaten on the way there.  Driving home, we were so close to having an accident that the police pulled over the car that had tried to turn left illegally in front of us.  10 minutes later, my heart rate was finally coming back down to normal levels and I got home to find the dog, still obviously upset over Gregg’s blown save, has defecated from one end of the house to the other.

Another cleanup and then a cautious drive back to pre-school, now done in a hard-driving rain and slow-driving traffic.  The fact that ESPN radio replayed the news of Gregg getting torched every 15 minutes was icing on the cake.  Sure, I could have turned it off, but what else would I listen to on the radio?  Music? 

Come on.

Anyway, the Cubs deficit to the Cardinals is pretty much equal to the number of walkoffs Gregg has allowed this year.  Therefore, in an effort to find a way to win winnable games, Cub manager Lou Piniella pitched Gregg to the curb in favor of Carlos Marmol on Tuesday.  Marmol, whom the best players in baseball literally cannot hit, also leads the world in walks issued per inning.  He has long been expected to take the closer role for the Cubs,  but that was long before he turned into Ebby Calvin LaLoosh.

The Cubs obviously have more problems than the back-end of their rotation, but since most of the franchise’s history involves gut-wrenching losses, Piniella must have felt he had to make a move.  Marmol owns the K-rate of a dominant closer, but his aforementioned wildness means the Cubs (or me and my dog) aren’t likely going to rest any easier now in the 9th inning than they did with Gregg.