God apologizes to Jews for scheduling Yom Kippur during Hamels start

PHILADELPHIA and HEAVEN — A remorseful God, already reeling from a very taxing Day of Atonement, issued a tearful apology to the world’s Jews for a scheduling snafu which saw many Jews forced to make difficult decisions between their religion and Cole Hamels.

“I owe a strong apology to the Jews of the world, as well as to the Philadelphia Phillies, ‘King’ Cole Hamels, and all of the citizens of the world,” God said in a statement. “Having Yom Kippur line up so that it was just ending as King Cole was taking the mound was an awful error in judgment on my part. I feel terrible and assure you that in future years, it will not happen again.”

God’s credibility on the matter had slowly been being rebuilt after the so-called Koufax Kontroversy, when Sandy Koufax could not pitch the first game of the World Series in 1965 due to the high holy day. While Hamels is not Jewish, God claimed that this event was even more severe than the Koufax incident.

“The thing with Sandy was bad, I’m not going to lie,” God said. “I mean, it was bad. It’s taken me decades to get over that. But this is much worse. I mean, here I am taking a world of loyal Jews, who just spent the last 24 hours purging their bodies and repenting their sins, and I’m going to deny them seeing His Majesty toe the rubber in the biggest start of his life? It’s awful. I am so ashamed.”

God said that he’s received a lot of letters and calls and prayers from various Jews, most of which have been forgiving in tone.

“That’s crap–they have to do that,” God said. “I mean, it’s Yom Kippur, of course they’re going to forgive me. But I hold myself to a higher standard. A lot of them said they were sure it was just a coincidence and bad planning, but you know what? I’m God. So I can sort of reschedule things pretty easily. I mean, I’ve got a plague of locusts lined up to attack the Dodgers at some point; I could have very easily delayed this game for a few hours so people could see the whole start. I could do it easily. I’m God.”

God said that in the future he’ll try and be much more sensitive to the feelings of the world’s Jews.

“I mean, let’s shoot straight here, I need to do a better job,” God said. “When I called them the ‘Chosen People,’ I certainly didn’t intend that to mean ‘Chosen to miss King Cole bitch the Dodgers all over the field.’”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!