Sports Illustrated has a list of the best ballparks based on different sets of criteria on their website. It’s a cool feature worth checking out if you are a baseball fan. Wrigley for some reason is at #15..and The Cell is at #8?? What’s that all about?

See it here.

We here at obviate met Fred Carlos by chance at last year’s Lollapalooza during Ted Leo’s set. He traveled from Hawaii to the festival. Yeah. Real far. Since then, he’s become a good friend to us as well as a fierce critic of just about everything imaginable.

Without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen…Fred Carlos.

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Obviate 808: Outpost State by Fred Carlos

“I’m going to say some basketball player or some football player is my role model? That’s an insult to my mother, who scrubbed floors. That’s an insult to my father, who picked up junk in the alleys and preached on Sundays!”

-Mr. T (A.V. Club interview 1993)

So yeah, fuck baseball. There I said it. Fuck baseball. This the last season I try to understand what the fuck is so exciting about American cricket. No longer will I nervously fidget as I sit around with my white mainland expatriate friends, wondering if I should say something like “Getting Johann was HUGE”, without actually knowing what the fuck that meant, and wondering if I know another Hispanic named Johann. On the other hand I could see myself spending the rest of my life arguing, analyzing, and perpetuating this last vestige of colonial rule with friends and family:

I’m sure your natural reaction will be one of the following extremes:

“What an UNAMERICAN thing to say Fred! We should send your immigrant ass to an undisclosed location, hold you indefinitely without a warrant, and tie you down to a board and pour water down your throat until you reveal everyone else holding these terrorist thoughts.”

Lou Gehrig

Jackie Robinson

“You just don’t understand Fred. There’s a history, a science to this game, that might take a lifetime to understand. A family can support the same team generation after generation regardless of record. A team becomes ingrained with the cultural identity of a city, members of it’s roster becoming modern day heroes, for bringing pride in their performance as consummate professionals, at well as displaying class and an indefatigable drive to compete and succeed through hard word and determination. Baseball’s history and it’s players encapsulate all of the ideals that brought social equity and economic success in the United States.”

I say fuck all of that. If there are four generations of fans waiting for a World Series, then you have four generations worth of chumps.

Maybe it’s because my state doesn’t have any NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB teams that makes me feel uncomfortable with watching those sports. Maybe it’s because Judo was my preferred sport/hobby in high school. Maybe it’s all that hardcore I listened to at an impressionable age. Or maybe it was when my classmate Takashi, a Japanese expatriate/fellow nerd, who handed me my first Pride video in AP U.S. History. All I know is when I first saw Bob Sapp tap out to a man who weighed two hundred pounds less than him in front of a stadium, I knew I was hooked.

You know what else has a long storied history? One that knows no cultural, racial and social boundaries. You like science in your past time? You like tradition? Well let me show you the face of freedom.

UFC Lightweight Champ BJ Penn

BJ “The Prodigy” Penn Vs. Joe “Daddy” Stevenson

What do you see? I see a Hawaiian man promoting the Kau Inoa movement for Hawaiian recognition/sovereignty the best way he knows how, hurting white people until they get it. If you see a barbaric display of testosterone, then you drink tea with this man and his friends.

Watch this.

This man is a Member of Parliament representing Zagreb and a former member of Croatia’s counter-terrorist task force. You heard me right. Member of fucking Croatian Parliament and a cop. Hence the nick name CroCop.

This guy has a masters in mathematics and taught high school Algebra. (I’ve had a beer with a couple of Mr. Rich Franklin’s students and they claimed he was super laid back.)

Have a problem with your network? Ask these guys. The used to be IT directors. They are Joe Lauzon and Elvis Sinosic.

The summer sports doldrums will soon be here much to the dismay of my beer swillin’ brethren. The Olympics doesn’t have much to offer in terms of excitability to the point worth brawling here in U.S., but it does give me an opportunity to turn a few of your hipster heads to an alternative. Attention haircuts/hipster douchebags, if you feel the need to intellectualize/wax philosophic endlessly about a sport this summer without feeling emasculated then try MMA out. Do it quickly though since two of the major promotions netted network deals (Elite XC with CBS and StrikeForce with NBC) and we all know how you feel about things coming out of obscurity. If you feel better this guy loves it too:

Douchebag.

Reading on this article. The eighth question from the bottom says that the marquee at Wrigley Field is protected by the Chicago City Council’s landmark status, so it would be legally difficult to change the actual marquee outside of Wrigley if the naming rights are sold.

…and this. Cheech is the man.

It’s a big day over here at obviate.

That’s right.

Ted Lilly has his 2008 debut for the Cubs today against the Brewers. After a suprisingly good season last year (he was the most consistent Cubs pitcher all year) the man is prime for his true breakout season.

His parents had the balls to give him the middle name “Roosevelt”. Theodore Roosevelt Lilly. How sweet is that?

He beat up his manager on the Blue Jays and then signed with the Cubs even though the Blue Jays offered him the same exact deal.

I firmly beleive that this is the man’s season. Come October, he will be the 2008 National League Cy Young Winner. Why? He’s a pitbull.

To read more about the man, the myth, the big 3-0, click here.

Jeff “MILW was a bad choice” Suppan doesn’t stand a chance.

I decided on a whim to purchase a ticket to the Cubs home opener today. Fifteen bucks for standing room only wasn’t a bad deal. Due to the rain, I left pretty early on, which was ridiculous considering that Fukudome hit a 3 run homer to tie it in the ninth. We still lost in the tenth, unfortunately.