Baseball As Zero-Sum Game

The underperforming Yankees are hurting the city in more ways than one:

City businesses stand to miss out on making $141 million this fall if the Yankees fail to make the playoffs for the first time in 13 years, according to a study commissioned by The Post.

The report conducted by NYU adjunct professor John Tepper Marlin shows that if the Yankees snag at least a wild-card berth, a first-round appearance could fill the coffers of bars, restaurants and other businesses across the city with $26 million.

Marlin, a former number-crunching chief economist for three former city comptrollers, said the Bronx Bombers would need to make the playoffs every year if the city hopes to reap any economic benefits, a feat many fans and businesses have taken as a given since 1995.

“If they’re not, you can argue that the city loses money,” he said. “You would think that with such a bloated payroll, the Yankees would make the playoffs.”

The Tautological Brilliance Of The MTA

Useless train announcement of the day goes to:

Due to an incident involving trains at the Flushing-Main Street Station, there is no train service in both directions between the Flushing-Main Street Station and the Willets Point-Shea Stadium Station.

The Urban Equivalent Of The False-Front Western Town: The Fake Store

The film set fakeout catches Queens foodies off guard, resulting in culinary blue balls:

The opening of a new Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights may not raise eyebrows — that is, unless it does not actually serve food and its owner is “Daily Show” correspondent and actor Aasif Mandvi.

For several weeks, the Tandoori Palace has been open (and closed) for business along a busy strip of 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights as Mandvi and director David Kaplan (who shot the 2007 Sundance Film Festival entry “Year of the Fish”) filmed “7 to the Palace,” an independent Tandoori comedy in which the diverse neighborhood acts as a character.

. . .

Producer Lillian LaSalle said the film’s crew set up shop at neighborhood eatery Ashoka, at 74-14 37th Ave., one month ago, designing a sign for the film’s fictional restaurant and using local businesses as office space.

“If you’d drive by, you would see our awning,” she said. “The locals kept wanting to go into the restaurant and check it out, so we had to put a sign on the door that said, ‘This is not a restaurant, it’s a [movie] set.’ But we’ve been honored to shoot here. The business owners have been very enthusiastic and incredibly accommodating. On one day, I used a hair salon as my office and, in days prior, we set up in an Afghan kebab house.”

LaSalle, also Mandvi’s manager, said the film completed shooting the Jackson Heights scenes last weekend and would next film sequences at Bayside’s Fort Totten before wrapping in early August.

Just Don’t Think You Can Straighten This Out In An Afternoon At Family Court

A-Rod and C-Rod want a quick divorce:

Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez and his estranged wife are expected to begin negotiations in the Big Apple this week, hoping to quickly settle their divorce case to avoid a public “slugfest” over money, sources told The Post yesterday.

“They’re going to try and arrive at a settlement so they don’t have a very public dispute,” said a source familiar with the situation. “The two of them are coming to New York so they don’t end up with a battle royal. It’s to avert . . . a slugfest for dollars.”

. . . and fortunately for them they can go elsewhere to dissolve the marriage, as New York is one of the few places that does not provide for no-fault divorce . . .

Slow News Day

This just in — U.N. diplomats still haven’t paid their parking tickets:

More than a decade after Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared war on diplomatic scofflaws over unpaid parking tickets, the city is still owed more than $18 million, leaving many New Yorkers enraged.

“They should pay,” said Carmen Mercer, 35, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, standing outside a midtown DMV office. “Everybody else has to pay. It comes with the responsibility of having a car.”

Deadbeat nations are clearly in no rush to pay off their debts, the vast majority of which were incurred before a 2002 agreement provided more parking spaces for them. That deal has cut the number of new tickets issued by 94 percent and helped lower the total owed to the city from more than $21 million.

Nevertheless, the total owed has been stuck at $18 million since at least 2005. Some 175 countries are to blame for the missing pot of money, with Egypt and Kuwait leading the list of offenders.

After all, $18 million could be used to build one-tenth of the High Line:

City officials and the Friends of the High Line presented the final design on Wednesday for the first phase of the High Line, the $170 million park that is under construction on the West Side of Manhattan and has been called one of New York City’s more distinctive public projects.

The park, modeled loosely on the Promenade Plantée in Paris, is being built on a 1.45-mile elevated freight rail structure that stretches 22 blocks, from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street, near the Hudson River. The rail structure, built to support two fully loaded freight trains, was built from 1929 to 1934 when the West Side was a freight-transportation hub, but has been unused for decades. The tracks are 30 to 60 feet wide and 18 to 30 feet above the ground.

Ground was broken in April 2006. Over the past two years, crews have been constructing the first, $85 million segment of the 6.7-acre park, which is estimated to cost $170 million and is financed by federal, city and private money.

Location Scout: UN, High Line.