With baseball season still months away, Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez has made different use of the private batting cage in his Miami Beach mansion. According to the New York Post, in the spirit of Art Basel week, Rodriguez is hanging works by New York painter Nate Lowman in the cage, and opening up the cage as a gallery of sorts. The exhibition has attracted stars such as Owen Wilson and Val Kimer to his home. [more]

The New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez is reportedly close to contract on a $12 million house on North Bay Road in Miami, according to the New York Post. The third baseman, who last year slashed $5 million off the listing price of his $14.9 million waterfront Coral Gables estate, also toured a 30,000-square-foot $57 million waterfront mansion on posh Indian Creek Island during his house hunt. Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima and her husband, basketball player Marko Jaric recently bought a $9 million pad on Indian Creek Island, which is also home to Carl Icahn and Julio Iglesias.

New York Yankees slugger Alexander Rodriguez is opting for a major buzz cut on his ritzy ranch in Coral Gables. A-Rod listed the waterfront estate for $14.9 million last October and just dropped the price to $9.9 million, a local broker said. And if he can’t find a buyer, he’ll take a renter willing to pony up $25,000 a month. In yet another sign of sunny Miami’s downwardly spiraling real estate
fortunes, Rodriguez is hawking the Biscayne Bay mansion for less than
the $12 million he and his estranged wife, Cynthia, paid in 2004. Comments

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Local brokers say former Miami Heat basketball star Shaquille O’Neal has finally sold his Miami Beach mansion, listed first in 2005 for $35 million. Shaq’s 20,000-square-foot mansion has been an object of fascination and a high-end symbol of the housing crunch ever since. No details on the sale have been released, though it reportedly closed Wednesday. O’Neal reportedly had arranged a November 2007 sale to baseball star Alex Rodriguez for a price between $25 million and $27 million, but deflation took its toll in both sports and real estate and the deal fell through. A November 2008 report put the manse back on the market for $19 million. At the start of this year, another broker listed it for $25 million, and the listing price was dropped in March to $22.5 million. [more]