JIMMY CHOO HEIST
Burglars made off with over $70,000 worth of Jimmy Choo handbags and shoes at the designer’s Madison Avenue store Sunday night just before midnight, police said. Two witnesses saw two men running out of the store with white shopping bags. The burglars hopped in a gray minivan and sped off.

A store security guard was downstairs in a storeroom when he heard noise in the showroom. He called police, who discovered the glass front door at 716 Madison Ave. was smashed. Thirty-four handbags with an average price of over $2,000 were stolen along with two pairs of shoes and one keychain, police said.

Witnesses gave police the license plate of the getaway van. No arrests have been made. Store employees declined to comment.

WOMAN MUGGED
A 30-year-old woman was mugged in her vestibule as she was coming home at 3 a.m. on Sunday, police said. The woman was looking for her keys to the front door of her walk-up at East 75th Street, between First and York avenues, when a man grabbed her purse, saying, “Shut up, all I want is your money,” according to police.

The robber became agitated when he could not find anything. When he grabbed her wallet, the woman started to fight back and all of her belongings fell to the floor. The man took about $20 before running off. Police said the woman’s lobby has a surveillance camera but did not indicate if they had tried to review the tape.

WIFE BEATER
A 44-year-old woman living at a shelter at 1645 First Ave. was punched repeatedly in the face by her husband early Tuesday morning at about 2:30, police said. The attack left the woman with a cut on her nose and a swollen face. She told police her husband also kicked her in the stomach.

The wife said the assault began during an argument over money and that her husband, 36, ran away after the beating.
Police had not made an arrest as of Tuesday afternoon.

Aguila Inc., a Bronx-based nonprofit that provides transitional housing for homeless families, runs a shelter at the address. It has various kinds of shelters across the city and it’s not clear if the husband was also living at the shelter. Aguila officials did not return messages Tuesday.

LAPTOPS LIFTED
Workers at a hair and nail salon at 15 E. 71st St. reported that two laptop computers were stolen last week sometime after the store had closed.

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ask a New York City mom if she’s worried about the sandbox germs her child plays in, and you’re likely to get a “yes,” along with a story about a disease that got passed around in one. Type “sandbox safety” on a parents’ listserv and you’ll usually see comments from parents who forbid or try to limit their children’s access to sandboxes.

But go to a pediatrician and you probably won’t get a warning about the common play area. So sandbox diseases must be an urban myth spread by overprotective parents?

Wrong, says Dr. Philip M. Tierno Jr., a clinical professor in the pathology and microbiology departments at New York University’s medical school.

Parents are smart to be concerned and vigilant, he says, particularly in public boxes that are not covered at night, like in New York City. He’d prefer his grandchildren didn’t play in such sandboxes but admits “my recommendations only carry so much weight.”
“Children are little bags of germs,” carrying more pathogenic organisms than adults, Tierno said, before adding that they are typically not infected by these dangerous beings.

Pigeons and stray cats pose some of the bigger dangers to urban park sandboxes. Rats, a big New York City fear, can also lead to problems, Tierno said, but they are less of a risk because they tend not to spend much time in sandboxes unless there’s food there, whereas a raccoon may burrow in and stay. Ants, spiders and other insects are also included on a long list of creatures that can lead to children’s exposure to harmful parasites and bacteria.

Tierno said there is the potential to be exposed to flesh-eating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis, but stomach flu and diarrhea are the most common ailments that result from children playing in sandboxes. He said that without an epidemiological study, it’s difficult to quantify how big a problem it is.

“When a child gets a cold or diarrhea, no one is going to go back and be able to trace it to the sandbox,” he said.

Tierno, along with many other doctors, maintains, “Open sandboxes should be avoided.”

If children do use them, he recommends they wash their hands thoroughly after use, never eat or drink in a sandbox and never use one if they have an open wound or cut.

But he does not fault doctors who do not warn parents about this.

“Pediatricians aren’t the end-all of knowledge,” he said. “They’ve got enough on their plate. It’s up to parents to play the major role.”
Dr. Ari Brown, pediatrician and co-author of Baby 411 and Toddler 411, agrees that sandboxes left open at night should be avoided, although she’s more concerned with the little creatures on the children than in the sand.

“The No. 1 yucky thing,” she wrote in an email, is pinworms, which come from “little kids who scratch their little heinies while playing in a sandbox, get the eggs on their hands and deposit the eggs in the sand unintentionally. Kid No. 2 shows up in the sandbox, plays with contaminated sand, puts his hands in his mouth and voila! Pinworms.”

Brown, based in Texas, was surprised to hear that New York sandboxes are left uncovered. She recalls that when she was a preschool teacher, she used a sensory table tub that they’d put sand and other materials in for children to touch. She said the risk of a messy house is substantially higher than stomach flu, which is why she suggests using a plastic tub with sand outside.

Both the city Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy, which takes care of about 20 boxes in the park, said they rake the sand daily for debris and change the sand at least once a year.

In 1989, the New York Times reported that the city was reducing the number of sandboxes as a cost-saving measure. This week, a Parks Department spokesperson said that the sandbox reduction back then had more to do with their loss in popularity from the Robert Moses era, the 1930s, when many park boxes were built.

“There has been a demand for creating new or revamping old ones and we look to include them in park renovation projects if the community requests them,” Philip Abramson wrote in an email this week.

He said sterilized “playground-grade” sand is used and that workers typically rake for hidden garbage on a daily basis. He added that nighttime covering wouldn’t prevent “much contamination” since sandboxes would still be exposed during the day.

Tierno said there are safer places in the playground. “Public parks have other things going on.”

Via Wiki Commons.

It’s just like a bodega to try and rig the system the way a hedge fund or a Wall Street Bank would do. They’re like the three amigos.

Bodegas, you see, are some of the New York City businesses that will clean up at the expense of the “little guys,” like pizza parlors and McDonald’s, if, as expected, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new soda policy goes into effect in September. That was just one of several hollow arguments opponents made at last week’s Board of Health public hearing.

The argument, advanced by Council Members Melissa Mark-Viverito and Letitia James, among others, is that because the limit to large sugary drinks applies to restaurants but not many bodegas, supermarkets and candy stores, it sets up an unfair advantage.

Here’s the apparent theory. You go into a shop for a pizza slice. You’re desperate for more than 16 ounces of soda—not so desperate that you’ll buy two or three sodas at the parlor, which would still be permissible, but just thirsty enough to take the slice into the bodega next door and wait on line again to buy a large amount of soda in one container. Or you are so determined to have a Big Gulp that you’ll choose your meal based on the available drink size.

Jimmy Alix, who works at an East Harlem candy store barely wide enough to squeeze in two-liter bottles of soda, is not expecting a rush of business from the pizza shop across the street or the other two a block away from his shop on Lexington Avenue and 124th Street.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “People are going to buy whatever size they have there.”

At least three other nearby places would be permitted to sell large sodas: a small grocery, another candy store and a Pathmark. Large soda consumption would undoubtedly continue, but some people would clearly drink less and, perhaps as important, the debate has likely made many people more aware of how many empty calories they drink.

Former Gov. David Paterson tried to talk truth to powerful bodegas and others a few years ago with a soda tax, but Big Sugar beat him. An industry ad back then showed a small grocery owner saying his customers calculate their food bills down to the penny. It was meant to trigger outrage that working-class people would pay more, but it really showed that the tax would lead to healthier choices.

Another of the absurd arguments by lobbyists and opponents is that it limits free choice. Although not a goal of the Bloomberg plan, it would actually expand choice in places like movie theaters.

The misnamed group leading the opposition backed in part by movie theater chains, New Yorkers for Beverage Choices, didn’t have anything to say about their effort to keep limits on consumer choice.

At least one opponent “expert” said there’s no proof that people will take in fewer calories. It shouldn’t take an Ivy League professor to point out the obvious—people tend to drink all that they are served—but it did.

“The science on this is quite clear:  As people are served larger portions, they generally consume more food,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity.

The Council members do care about the problem—James said she sees obesity in her Central Brooklyn district every day and it sends her to too many funerals. They’re right that the policy is not a complete solution, and other measures, like youth fitness programs, may be more helpful. But it seems they’re saying that if you don’t do everything you can to battle obesity, don’t do anything.

David Jones, a plan supporter and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York, said he has spent too much of his career trying to improve social services to wait for the perfect idea.

“I have to do something now,” he said at the hearing, “because this is really ripping through poor communities.”

Josh Rogers

A storied history for the Games, just not a feel-good one

My neighborhood should be relatively quiet for the next few weeks, although I’d be surprised if Mayor Michael Bloomberg cares any more.

Seven years ago, he and his deputy mayor at the time, Dan Doctoroff, were determined to get the Olympics to New York City by building a stadium in my backyard—well, a few blocks from me, actually. Knowing what long shots these things can be, I didn’t have too many NIMBY concerns.

I also wasn’t thinking too much about the Olympics’ history of hypocrisy, corruption and worse (we’ll get back to that).

The Olympics were on my mind because some of the Lower Manhattan leaders I was covering then were worried that the administration seemed more focused on the Hudson Yards stadium site than on rebuilding Downtown after 9/11.

It was clear City Hall was more interested in a stadium than the Olympics. For one, the city pushed Hudson Yards as the be-all to the Olympic gods, when there was a suitable alternative in Flushing where Citi Field now sits. For another, Doctoroff told me and undoubtedly many others that the Olympics are the spark that gets cities to do the big projects that they should be doing anyway.

I wonder. With the Olympics about to start in London, it doesn’t look like the city is happy with the $17 billion public investment. Perhaps the bribes that Olympic powers used to collect from cities were not worth the money. Reuters surveyed 27 economists—all but four said the Olympics would not bring a lasting economic boost to a city mired in Europe’s doldrums.

A column by John Lanchester in a Bloomberg-owned publication, Businessweek, noted that subway commuters are being warned about 30-minute waits to board London’s Tube. He also wrote that Londoners are grumbling so much that pop stars were warned at a BBC concert not to play to the crowd with negative comments about the Olympics.

The stars would have hardly scratched the surface of the problems. At its best, the Games bring together the world’s greatest athletes to compete in many different sports at the same time. If the International Olympic Committee could stick to that simple, remarkable thing, it would be fine, but instead it bills the competition as some great effort to achieve international harmony—a task it has failed at miserably and repeatedly.

Hitler used the ’32 Olympics as an effective Nazi propaganda tool. Forty years later, the games returned to Germany and 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by terrorists. IOC President Avery Brundage did not mention the athletes at the memorial service, and the Olympics has never done a permanent memorial.

But the Olympics has not only not been “good for the Jews” as the saying goes. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were stripped of their medals in 1968 because they acted politically when they raised their hands to symbolize black power, even though German athletes had been allowed to do the Nazi salute.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics does not appear to have helped the cause of human rights in China, as proponents argued it would. For this year, the Olympics has tried to solve a problem that doesn’t exist—male athletes pretending to be women—by imposing a humiliating sex test based on questionable science on some women athletes.

With all of that said, London still may play host to some exciting moments with inspiring stories of individual athletes So let the Games begin—over there.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker.

Photo by John C Abell. Photo courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Could the board just be after a little fun and excitement? If there was a reliable count last week on election night, we’d have been certain whether or not Congressman Charlie Rangel staved off his strongest challenge in four decades by beating State Sen. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. We thought we were sure last Tuesday night that Rangel won handily, but we soon learned that many votes had not been counted in election districts where Espaillat had strong support.

Now we have the drama of Rangel, the former powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, declaring victory only to have it cast in doubt. If Rangel is certified the winner, his victory will be that much sweeter, and if Espaillat prevails in a recount, the heartache of Rangel’s fall would be compelling.

It’s stuff worthy of an HBO movie. Maybe the elections board figures a cliffhanger is needed to get more voters to come out in future elections.

Or maybe the BOE is feeling nostalgic for the not so olden days of the creaky voting machine levers. The machines were finally scrapped in 2010 in part because they increased the chances of human error.

At the end of the election night, often in dimly lit rooms, weary Board of Election workers would peer into the small boxes next to each name to look for the number of votes each candidate got at that machine. It was common for a number such as 150 for example, to be recorded as 50. So the election night return numbers typically were adjusted a week later when the machines were reexamined.

It all might be a little funny if there wasn’t the pesky problem that we may not be sure if the people of the 13^th Congressional District will end up getting the representative the voters chose last week.

Susie Kavanaugh

Sixteen teachers from New York City private, charter and traditional public schools are being honored this year with Blackboards. This year, the 11th for the Blackboards, we received about 1,000 nominations from parents, students, principals and fellow teachers, and the final selections were made by editors and executives from four Manhattan Media publications—Our Town, West Side Spirit, Our Town Downtown and New York Family.

One of our honorees, the beloved Jon Goldman at The Beacon School, unfortunately died this spring, but we wanted to recognize his extraordinary work over the years.

In these pages, you’ll find 16 remarkable stories of teachers, including Susie Kavanaugh at Corlears Elementary School, who empties her classroom every year so her students can decide how to fill it up, and Ross Grosshart, an electrical engineer who changed jobs mid-career so he could teach college-level courses at Brooklyn Tech.

Several other Blackboard winners also chose teaching after starting on a different path, and their students and our city are better off because of it.

—Josh Rogers,
Editor, Backboard Awards

Barbara Ciner: Life Lessons Before Kindergarten

Rose Coffield: Pre-K Teacher Uses Video to Teach Kids About Play

Cara Beseda, She’ll Give a Student the Socks Off Her Feet

Lisa Harrelson, She Cheers Students, and They  Return the Favor

Lindsay Wener, Life Lessons from the South Side to the Upper East Side

Tonia Percy, Second Graders Are Happy  to See a Familiar Face

Laurel Nyeboe, Opening the Doors to the World

Susie Kavanaugh She Empties the Classroom  Before Filling Their Minds

Jonathan Goldman, Beacon Students Remember Jon, Their Inspirational Teacher

Sammie Smith, A Passion for Writing, Theater and Latin

Lois Eder, Special Teacher Making Strides with Students

Andrew Adler, Using Computers to Teach the Three Rs

Marija Kero, Bringing Math Alive by Connecting  it to Students’ Lives

Dr. Warren Wollman, Physics Doctorate Demystifies Mathematics at Rodeph Sholom

Bernadette Robine, From Paris to Brooklyn

Ross Grosshart, Engineer Goes Back to High School Mid-Career

These are obviously the reasons I’m writing about bike and street safety—except they aren’t. I had already decided to write about this the night before, at a neighborhood meeting a few blocks away from the site of both incidents.

The meeting, organized by a political club in Chelsea, was called “Pedestrians & Bikers: Do They Have to Collide?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. You see, I have biked these streets on and off for about 20 years. I’m like many New York City riders: I often don’t wait for green lights. I have also been walking in the city since I learned how and I’m now like many city pedestrians: I often don’t wait for green lights.

I also drive from time to time, and I always wait for green lights. The city would be terrifying if drivers violated the rules of the road as often as bikers and pedestrians do.
It’s scary enough. About 150 city pedestrians a year are killed in auto accidents, as Paul Steely White, executive director of the cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, told the meeting’s attendees, mostly senior citizens. Bike-related pedestrian deaths rarely happen, about once every two or three years, White added.

“Someone with a two-ton SUV might have more responsibility than a bicyclist,” White said. “That’s not to say a bicyclist doesn’t also have responsibility.”

The audience, though mostly civil, was not in a mood to shift their anger from bikers to drivers. “They’re a menace—they’re a pest,” said one of cyclists.

Many want to require bikers to register their vehicles like drivers. White thinks it’s problematic for many reasons: the NYPD does not want the added enforcement burden, bike license plates would be too small to have the desired deterrent effect and it would discourage people from starting to bike.

The explosion of bike lanes in the city has doubled the number of riders in10 years, White said, yet total cycling injuries have actually gone down, an indication that the lanes have encouraged bikers to ride safer.

Reported accidents with pedestrians, bikers and drivers have also been reduced on streets with bike lanes, according to the city. It could mean overall accidents are down, but it’s hard to know for sure. Many mishaps like my wife’s don’t get reported.

White, for his part, wants to see riders like me get ticketed. I’m sure anti-biker readers out there agree. They may never have gotten past my admission of violations.

Obeying the rules and riding safely are important, but it’s possible to do one without the other. Bikers are not required to slow down if they see a cluster of pedestrians on a sidewalk—it’s a good bet at least one walker will step in the street without looking—but it’s smart to slow down anyway. When I blow a light, I go very slowly and look every way to make sure it’s safe. I see many riders do the same thing.

In all my years of riding, I have hit pedestrians twice. Both times, they were jaywalkers crossing at midblock. One woman was dodging between stalled traffic on 34th Street when she stepped in front of me. The other time, a man was looking in the wrong direction when he stepped into a bike lane and me, knocking both of us to the ground. Fortunately, no one was hurt either time.

White acknowledges there is “rampant lawlessness” among bikers and pedestrians, but he doesn’t say they do it more often than city drivers, who often go faster than 30 miles per hour.

“Most New Yorkers don’t know what the speed limit is,” he said. “Can we start there?”

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker.

* A military man who thinks the nation’s biggest problem is that businesses are taxed too much.

*Two toddlers and an infant.

* A man wearing a Burberry raincoat, a Calvin Klein gray pin-stripe suit and a blue J Crew tie.

The suited man, Matthew Bolton, said many in the 99 percent dress in suits. His brief case with a large “Occupy” sticker showed he was with the crowd.

Bolton, 31, a political science professor at Pace University, not far from Wall Street, acknowledged the Occupy movement has not yet had an effect in Washington but added, “Politics doesn’t only happen in Congress. What Occupy has done is change the conversation for the media….

“I also hope it does make a change in Washington. It has already been a symbolic victory and symbolism is incredibly important.”

Throughout the crowd, drums of course were beating, but guitars, banjoes, saxophones and trumpets were also being played.

Police presence in the park was extremely light but it grew by a little later in the morning. Most in the crowd did not seem to notice police, who did not move on a few violating city law by smoking in the park.

The crowd stayed off the park’s plush lawn, which was closed but barely protected with low ropes a few inches off the ground.

The military man, Luis del Carpio, 43, a veteran of the first Gulf War, works in the Far East conditioning elite golfers. He said he had a business in this country but tax policy drove him overseas.

“I hope they change the tax laws so US small businesses can make money and hire people,” he said.

He’d like to see the Occupy movement shift a little to focus more on taxes than income inequality, but he supports their cause.

“If you are a corporation, you are hardly paying any taxes but if you are small business you are paying high costs.”

He said he ran a day care center in Texas but had to close it because of his taxes.

A mother of one of the toddlers said she came to support her friends in Occupy, and hadn’t thought about what she hoped to someday teach her 18-month old son about it.

“I’m  not the one to ask because I’m not a big occupier myself,” she said.

Except for a large jar of Skippy peanut butter, there was not much corporate support at Occupy’s free food table. Around noon, pasta and sauce was on the menu.

As one of the protesters put it, “The revolution must be fed.”

You can follow New York Press columnist Josh Rogers @JoshRogersNYC.

The name Etan Patz conjures up so much for so many in New York City.

If you’re under 30, it is likely to draw a blank stare, but for many others it’s different, particularly if you were growing up in the city around 1979, when Patz, a 6-year-old Soho boy, disappeared on his first solo trip to school.

“Mom used to say, ‘You’ll end up like Etan Patz and no one will ever see you again’ when I walked too far ahead in NYC as a kid,’” @AlexSalta wrote on Twitter last week. “It worked.”

Patz was a trending topic this week and last as investigators went back to a Soho basement to dig for clues with a new suspect in the case. It’s the kind of story that grips you every time it resurfaces, although it probably didn’t change behaviors as much as people think.

Peggy Schneider, naturally, was thinking about Patz this week, since she was in middle school in Manhattan when the boy disappeared—but then again, she thinks about Patz and his parents a lot.

“I can still see his smiling face; I have probably thought about it once a month for my entire life,” she said in a phone interview.

Her friend was Patz’ babysitter, so she had a personal connection, but even that was not enough to change her habits. She still traveled the city on her own as a young teen.

So did I and most of my friends. The city was less safe in the ’80s, yet many parents then were much less protective than they are now.

Columnist Lenore Skenazy got a lot of mileage a few years ago when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone, and has since expanded the column into a movement to promote raising “Free-Range Kids.” Her column would never have drawn the uproar 30 years ago that it did in 2008.

I was a few years older than Skenazy’s son when I began riding the subway with a friend, but around the 3rd grade, I began walking to school alone—of course, that simply involved crossing a street that my parents could see from our window. My friends and I would play ball after school with other neighborhood kids, and we managed to do it without refs or adult supervision.

Still, I didn’t have to cross any streets to get to the concrete “field,” and I know things will be different when my son reaches the age when we have to start making these impossible decisions. There is a lot to be said for letting kids figure it out for themselves, but the rub is deciding when to do it and how much to let go.

Schneider’s youngest sister, Zoe, 40, is a year older than Patz would be today. She doesn’t remember being reigned in much growing up, but somewhere between then and now, city parents began tightening the leashes for better and, perhaps, for worse.

She may be more tapped into this generation of New Yorkers than anyone; she is the organizer of Magic Garden, a large monthly party for people who grew up in the city, giving them a chance to meet people who don’t ask, “What was that like?”

She used to come home late at night from babysitting gigs when she was young, but her immediate neighborhood in Tudor City was shielded from cars. Now in Harlem, she said “it is really scary” to think about her children someday walking by themselves near so much traffic.

“Babysitting at age 9 is crazy, but it was what it was,” she said. “It all worked out and everyone made it through.”

Not that parents didn’t worry quietly. Mine are fuzzy about how Patz affected their thinking, but my mother does remember me taking the train to high school in the Bronx. It wasn’t all that long after Patz disappeared.

“I always say I spent four years looking out the window,” she told me.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

It looks like the baseball season is going to last more than a week for me. The season does go at least six months for all teams, but it’s tough to root for a “small-market” ball club once it gets to the point where the postseason appears to be a fantasy.

I used to root for a big market club, but then something changed. Not to me—to it. I didn’t switch teams, my team switched on me. The New York Mets still play in the largest market in Major League Baseball, but since the owners’ finances have been jeopardized by their dealings with Bernie Madoff, they’ve shown me and other Met fans what it’s like to root for a team in a small city, where big-money cable contracts are not possible.

The Mets entered the season with universal predictions of doom, but have defied them for now, coming out strong with three straight wins against a good team, the Atlanta Braves.

The pitching is exceeding expectations so far, and the new crop of young, homegrown players have started out well. Meaningful baseball for most of April appears assured.

If they can somehow make it to August, training camp for the football Giants will be in full swing. I’m constantly and pleasantly reminded of that by my toddler, who on an almost daily basis says, “J.P.P., Osi, Eli won the Super Bowl.”

By the summer, I’ll be able to push the Mets out of my mind if their cost-cutting ways catch up with them.

Does a true fan stay interested even when his team has no hope of going further? Maybe, but I have logged more than enough losing seasons with too many teams, and I just don’t have the time or motivation anymore. I also used to follow the Knicks (I still check in for things like Linsanity) and Rangers (perhaps they’d win me back with a trip to the Stanley Cup finals), as well as college basketball and football. I’m not sure where I found the time.

Back to the Mets. Unlike most fans, I was OK with them not re-signing Jose Reyes. As rare a talent as he is, he is typically not able to play a full season and is probably not worth the large contract he got with the Marlins. The problem is that the team had no ability or interest in using the Reyes savings to improve the team. The owners appear to have escaped the worst of the Madoff fallout, but they are not likely to convince fans that things have changed until they make a smart, budget-hurting baseball move.

Their predecessors brought me my first pain as a sports fan when they traded “The Franchise,” Tom Seaver, during a contract squabble.

The plight of Met fans now highlights the fundamental problem with baseball today: A majority of teams are made to be perennial longshots because they can’t compete with richer teams. It’s certainly possible for a low-budget team to win it all, but the field is not level.

The solution is obvious. If teams shared more revenue like the savvy, socialist billionaires who own NFL teams, it would generate broader fan interest and probably more revenue. Baseball owners would be wise to have a salary floor to insure small city teams didn’t pocket the riches from clubs like the Yankees.

Unfortunately, there is little chance owners would ever go for this, since they have always focused on artificial ways to limit how much they spend on players.

So Met fans are left to root for the team becoming a big market club again and for small joys this season, like, perhaps Wednesday night, when a recovered Johan Santana takes on the Nats’ ace, Stephen Strasburg.

Let’s go Mets. August isn’t that far away.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.