Respect Authority

As if the nonstop and completely superfluous coverage of the new Yankee Stadium wasn’t annoying enough, now add Joel Osteen to the mix.

The douchebag pastor of the people, whose stadium sermons get a bigger audience than most actual baseball games (forty fucking thousand people!) is bringing his message to the Bronx, with a “Night of Hope,” despite the fact that I’m pretty sure Barack Obama patented the word “hope” last year. 

Tickets to the event are $15 a pop, because everyone knows getting advice like “I know [God] can get me where I need to be if I just trust and believe, he will bring the right connections,” from an uneducated, untrained, un-anything-except-fond-of-hair-gel faux pastor costs a pretty penny. I mean, that’s not the kind of sage wisdom one stumbles across during an afternoon in front of the television. …Unless, of course, they are watching one of Osteen’s many televised events. 

Hopefully while he’s there, Osteen can go ahead and bless the stadium, thereby confirming thousands of religious sports fans’ and players’ collective conviction that God gives a shit about professional athleticism. And then, perhaps more optimistically, he’ll get hit by a fly ball in the head.