With Manny Ramirez signing a minor-league contract with the A’s Monday, one of the most feared sluggers in baseball history has suddenly become a journeyman. If Ramirez plays a game for Oakland—he first has to serve a 50-game suspension for violating MLB’s drug policy—it will mark his fourth team since leaving Boston in July 2008.

Since then, Ramirez has hit 45 home runs, after stints with the Dodgers, White Sox and Rays. Of the 25 players with at least 500 career home runs, only one hit more after departing the team with which he hit No. 500. Frank Robinson, who hit his 500th with Baltimore in 1971, had 83 more for the Dodgers, Angels and Indians.

It’s not totally uncommon for great players to bounce around a bit at the end of their careers. Babe Ruth hit six homers for the Boston Braves in 1935, while Willie Mays hit 14 of his 660 with the New York Mets. Braves legend Eddie Mathews actually hit his 500th home run with Houston, and then played for the Tigers after that.

The only player comparable to Ramirez might be Jim Thome, who is at spring training with the Phillies. Philadelphia would be his fourth team since he hit No. 500 in 2007, but he’s hit only 40 since leaving the White Sox.

—Jared Diamond

Beachfront homes $6 million and under, in Dana Point, Calif., Osterville, Mass., and Loveladies, N.J. Juliet Chung has details on The News Hub.

DANA POINT, Calif. $5 Million

A 4,000-square-foot home, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, on a 0.2-acre lot

DETAILS: This two-story, Cape Cod-style home has a master suite that runs the length of the house and has a double-sided fireplace and a terrace. The property also has a fire pit, outdoor fireplace, lawn and patio. 2011 property taxes are about $88,700.

BY THE SEA: The beach is sandy and is near Dana Point Harbor.

HANG TEN: Stewart Surfboards, six miles away in San Clemente, offers handmade custom surfboards and also rents out boards.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Chance of rain, high 67 degrees.

SOURCE: Doug Echelberger, Echelberger Group, 949-498-7711, doug@echelberger.com; Realtor.com

OSTERVILLE, Mass. $5.5 Million

A 3,400-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, on 2.2 acres in Cape Cod

DETAILS: This beachfront Colonial was built in 1935 and renovated over the years. The L-shaped property fronts a saltwater pond and also has a tennis court. It’s about a mile away from the center of the village. 2011 property taxes are nearly $46,000.

BY THE SEA: The private beach fronts Nantucket Sound. The area is popular for biking and walking.

HANG TEN: Boarding House Surf Shop is eight miles away in Hyannis.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Windy, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Jack Cotton, Sotheby’s International Realty, 508-957-5500, jack@jackcotton.com; Realtor.com

LOVELADIES, N.J. $6 Million

A 4,300-square-foot home with five bedrooms and five bathrooms, on 0.7-acre on Long Beach Island

DETAILS: The home has a double-height family room, an elevator, plus a screened porch and several ipe decks. There’s also a pool. The home is being sold furnished; 2011 property taxes are $34,000.

BY THE SEA: The property has 125 feet of beach frontage. Grassy dunes lead to a sandy beach.

HANG TEN: Ron Jon Surf Shop, seven miles away in Ship Bottom, offers surfboards and apparel.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Clear, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Benée Scola, Benée Scola & Company, 609-494-0077,

benee@beneescola.com.

—
Juliet Chung

By ELIOT BROWN and LAURA KUSISTO

NEW YORK—The risks of speculative office building, especially during a real-estate slump, are obvious at the 11 Times Square skyscraper here. Just stand on the sidewalk and look up.

More than a year after it opened, the 1.1 million square-foot building is about 60% empty and unleased. Its retail space along 42nd Street is bare. Neighbors can see unfinished floors throughout the building.

The tower, built by a Prudential Financial Inc.-run fund and New Jersey-based developer SJP Properties, cost $950 million to build, with construction starting in mid-2007. The first tenant arrived in January 2011, but the building has suffered from bad timing and fierce competition.

Tenants who looked at the new skyscraper but decided against it include the National Basketball Association, law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP and even restaurant chain Buffalo Wild Wings Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Prudential now faces the possibility of having to pour more cash into 11 Times Square. Its $720 million construction loan, held by a group led by PNC Financial Services Group Inc., must be repaid in May.

Cathy Marcus, a senior portfolio manager for the Prudential real-estate fund that made the investment in 11 Times Square, said officials at the Newark, N.J., company expect to extend or pay off the current loan using the fund’s own capital. “We really believe long-term in this asset and in its performance,” she said.

Prudential valued 11 Times Square in September at $855 million, down $95 million from its development cost, according to documents Prudential provided to investors in its real-estate fund. The Wall Street Journal reviewed a copy.

Real-estate developers in Atlanta, Seattle and other U.S. cities also are struggling because of office buildings that hit the market as it was cooling. Some developers that began projects in 2006 and 2007 with no commitments from tenants have been forced to shrink rents, restructure loans or even hand the buildings over to lenders.

Speculative office-building debacles are less common now than during the early 1990s, partly because memories of that bust reduced the number of developers and lenders willing to get projects off the ground without substantial pre-leasing.

While Prudential is betting that it can fill the tower with high-paying tenants that have thus far gone elsewhere, it faces a Manhattan office market that is starting to wobble. Bank of America Corp., UBS AG and other financial firms are now subleasing or shedding hundreds of thousands of square feet as the industry downsizes.

After construction of 11 Times Square began in mid-2007, Prudential and SJP asked more than $120 per square feet for upper floors of the building. Rents now range from $75 a square foot to more than $100 a square foot, depending on the floor, according to commercial real-estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle

As of December, the average asking rent for prime space in Midtown Manhattan, generally in older buildings was $71 a square foot, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

In 2010, Prudential and SJP landed the biggest tenant yet at 11 Times Square: law firm Proskauer Rose LLP leased about one-third of the space. Leasing since has been slow, even though last year was the busiest in Manhattan since 2006.

An SJP spokeswoman declined to comment. Prudential company officials say they feel good about the leasing prospects, and they don’t want to cut rents and sign long-term leases at low values. “To drop rents on a new, state-of-the-art building to make them comparable to buildings in Midtown that are an average of 75 years old doesn’t reflect what we believe to be the immediate value of the space,” said Theresa Miller, a Prudential spokeswoman.

Rent increases don’t seem imminent. Midtown’s vacancy rate for prime property is 10.3% compared with 5.4% in mid-2007, according to Cushman & Wakefield. “There’s still good activity in media and tech, but financial services is the one area that’s in turmoil, and that’s a lot of what drives midtown,” said Robert Sammons, vice president of research at Cassidy Turley, a commercial brokerage.

Mitchell Konsker, a broker on the Jones Lang LaSalle team leasing office space at 11 Times Square, said there is interest from potential tenants in 450,000 square feet. “It’s not that we’re under any pressure to lease it up within a specific time frame,” Mr. Konsker said.

Prudential has drawn down about $579 million of its $720 million loan thus far, the company said. It would likely need much of the balance to lure tenants, in part by helping with their expenses for new space.

Given the building’s current value, experts believe Prudential would be able to refinance the construction loan for no more than about $600 million—leaving a painful $120 million hole.

PNC declined to comment.

—Anton Troianovski contributed to this article.

Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com and Laura Kusisto at laura.kusisto@wsj.com

This year, auto makers are accelerating a drive to link your next car’s dashboard to all the music and data stored in the Internet cloud.

Car makers and innovators of the mobile infotainment industry will offer consumers easier in-car access to smartphone and tablet applications that create personalized radio stations or locate good restaurants, and that someday might even find the cheapest nearby gasoline.

Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc. has deals with nearly two dozen major auto makers, including BMW and Hyundai, to adapt its popular streaming-music app to allow consumers to easily create or call up personalized music channels on the road. Rival streaming radio services such as Stitcher, TuneIn and National Public Radio are also scrapping for space on dashboard displays.

In the not-too-distant future, a car with a radio that receives only AM or FM will qualify as an antique.

“We expect Pandora to be available in any car,” says Jessica Steel, the company’s executive vice president for business development. “We’ve been planting seeds for three years. We’re about to reap the fruits.”

Pandora is among the best known of an array of information and entertainment services looking to extend their reach beyond smartphones and tablet apps.

A recent survey by Deloitte LLP found 59% of car buyers aged 19 to 31 viewed in-car connectivity as the most important aspect of a car’s interior, and 72% wanted to use smartphone apps in their cars.

Making Internet radio more accessible in cars presents a challenge to SiriusXM, the subscription satellite radio service now available in about 67% of vehicles sold. SiriusXM said earlier this month it added 1.7 million subscribers last year. It has outlined plans to compete against free Internet music with more exclusive programming and highlighting unique news and sports channels.

Several auto makers have opened offices in Silicon Valley to get plugged in to the rapidly shifting online-services market. BMW AG now has 30 people there tracking mobile-app development and looking for deals. Car makers were also a prominent presence at the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, earlier this month in Las Vegas, touting their latest connectivity deals.

The confluence of mobile infotainment and cars is in its early days, and the ability to maintain a seamless Internet connection over today’s wireless networks isn’t guaranteed. Auto makers are still sorting out how to avoid expensive fights over basic technology standards, and are taking diverse approaches to how they offer connections to customers.

Some companies offer full-service app access only through dashboard navigation systems. Others let mobile phones do most of the work, keeping the onboard hardware costs down. Some auto makers want to carefully control how drivers interact with potentially distracting menus and data. Others are more comfortable letting consumers decide.

“All the [car makers] have taken a little bit different approach,” says Doug VanDagens, director of Ford’s Connected Services.

Ford offers a system called AppLink free on cars equipped with its Sync system, which allows drivers to control smartphones with voice commands or buttons—physical and virtual. Ford offered 10 models with AppLink last year, and plans to roll out more this year, Mr. VanDagens says.

The AppLink system allows customers to stream music and other data from their wireless data providers. Ford can give developers the software codes for AppLink so they can design apps that work in the car. National Public Radio developed a compatible app to allow drivers to stream programming that will be available within the next four weeks, Mr. VanDagens says.

And car makers are looking beyond music services.

“People hunger for information when traveling,” says
Tim Nixon, executive director of engineering systems at GM’s OnStar subsidiary. “Show me an Italian restaurant. Show me the lowest gas price around me.” One idea: Design an app that knows when the car needs gas, and automatically searches for the cheapest nearby fuel.

Germany’s Audi is equipping new models with wireless modems that can transmit data roughly as fast as a standard cable modem.

“The vehicle is a Wi-Fi hot spot,” says Anupam Malhotra, product manager for Audi Connect. Audi uses that pipe to provide Google Earth maps to navigation systems, and passengers can get online with Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets using the car’s connection, which is essentially a big T-Mobile cellphone modem with its own account. Audi pays the first six months, and it’s about $25 a month afterwards.

What Audi isn’t doing is making it easy for customers to download just any app.

“Everybody’s being very careful about how apps are designed” to minimize distraction, Mr. Malhotra says.

Designing apps that are safe to use at speed and picking the services to offer are just two challenges auto makers face.

Mobile communications providers, such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, have struggled to expand their network data capacity fast enough to keep pace with demand.

The potential growth of in-car mobile data consumption is another reason “why the industry needs access to more spectrum,” says Jot Carpenter, vice president for government relations at CTIA-The Wireless Association, a wireless-industry trade group in Washington.

Write to Joseph B. White at joseph.white@wsj.com

Diane von Furstenberg

Iguatemi: It is a meeting place where generations come to flirt, eat and shop. Our tiny boutique in Iguatemi is my number two in the world. Incredible! Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, 2232, Jardim Paulistano; iguatemisp.com.br

Hotel Unique: The rooftop is the bar to hang out. Everyone stops there at some point while in Sâo Paulo. Avenida Brigadeiro Luís Antônio, 4700, Jardim Paulista; hotelunique.com

Hotel Fasano: I love the Fasano—it’s like an elegant private home. The service is wonderful and they have a lovely pool where you can swim secretly. Rua Vitório Fasano, 88, Cerqueira César; fasano.com.br

Livraria da Vila:Ever since I was a little girl I have loved to read and this is the best place for books. I could disappear in there for days. Rua Fradique Coutinho, 915; livrariadavila.com.br

Figueira Rubaiyat:This restaurant is such a peaceful place and the food is divine! Rua Haddock Lobo, 1738; rubaiyat.com.br

Parque Ibirapuera: I like to have an early hike here. There are magnificent tropical trees. As much as I love New York, it’s nice to feel far away sometimes.