Hoping to Expand His Playing Field

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Eric Davis, a former Dodger, has listed his Woodland Hills home at $1.2 million.

Davis, 38, and his wife, Sherrie, want more land and are looking to buy a home on one to two acres in the West Valley, where her family lives. Eric and Sherrie Davis have two children.

The outfielder, a native of L.A., joined the Dodgers in the early ‘90s and was known as Eric the Red when he played with the Cincinnati Reds during the 1980s. Likened to the great center fielder Willie Mays, Davis hit 37 homers and had 100 RBIs and 50 stolen bases in 1987, when he also won his first Gold Glove.

This fall he was selected as man of the year by fellow players during a broadcast of the 2000 Players Choice Awards. Davis hit .303 with six home runs and 40 RBIs in 254 at-bats for the Cardinals, who won the N.L. Central Division.

Davis, who made $4.5 million this season, filed for free agency in November, and has said he is thinking about retiring.

During the ’97 baseball season, Davis waged a successful battle against colon cancer. He won a number of awards for his courage in returning to the game. Among them was the Espy Award as Comeback Athlete of 1998. In 1999, he wrote the autobiography “Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story.”

This fall Davis said, “I don’t live for baseball the way I used to. It’s not the only priority in my life now.”

His Woodland Hills home of 11 years is Mediterranean in style with six bedrooms in 6,800 square feet.

Built in 1979, the home, behind gates, also has a 1,000-square-foot sports-media room, an office, a nine-car garage, a pool, spa, a gym and a full basketball court.

The home also has a family room with two large-screen TVs, a bar and a 400-gallon aquarium.

Judy and Doug Ross of Prudential John Aaroe in Encino have the listing.

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Laith Alsarraf, the 29-year-old founder and chief executive of Cybernet, and his wife have purchased an 820-acre quarter-horse ranch near Lake Hughes, just north of Santa Clarita and Castaic, for about $5 million.

The Alsarrafs, who live in Pasadena, plan to use the property, which was one of the leading quarter-horse ranches in the state, for homeless dogs, cats and horses.

The ranch had been owned for 50 years by the late aerospace industry executive Lawrence A. “Pat” Hyland, who headed Hughes Aircraft Co. for nearly 25 years, and his family. Hyland died at 92 in 1989.

His daughter, Ginger, sold the property at full price within three days of it being listed.

Cybernet, a leading age-verification system on the Internet, uses credit-card accounts through its AdultCheck system, to keep children out of about 50,000 adult Web sites.

Raymond Bekeris of John Bruce Nelson & Associates represented both sides of the ranch sale.

Film producer Chuck Roven (“Three Kings,” “City of Angels,” “12 Monkeys”) has purchased a 250-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley. The asking price was $5 million.

Roven bought the property as a second home for himself and his teenage daughter, Rebecca. They maintain their primary residence in the Beverly Hills area. Roven’s late wife and his daughter’s mother was Dawn Steel, Hollywood’s first woman studio chief. She died three years ago this month.

Roven and his daughter enjoy horseback riding, and they plan to keep horses on the Santa Ynez property, which has an eight-stall barn, a riding track and a ranch foreman’s cottage.

The property also has a six-bedroom antebellum-style main house, a car barn that can accommodate 20 cars and a three-bedroom carriage house-apartment with a two-story living room.

The 10,000-square-foot-plus main house was designed by its former owners to resemble Tara in “Gone With the Wind.” The three-story house has a 4,000-square-foot-plus veranda with columns. The property also has a koi pond, a stocked lake, an outdoor entertaining area for 300 to 400 guests, a tennis court and a helipad.

Besides selling the ranch, the former owners sold a nearby airplane hangar and a Victorian teahouse. They moved to Australia.

Roven is a partner in Atlas Entertainment, which he co-founded in 1994 with Bob Cavallo and Steel, after she resigned as head of Columbia Pictures. Atlas is co-producing the $50-million comic fantasy “Good Omens,” to be directed by Terry Gilliam and filmed in the U.K. toward the end of 2001.

Roven is also president of Third Rail Records. Besides producing movies, he has worked as a personal manager, managing such acts as Seal, the Goo Goo Dolls and Alanis Morissette.

The longtime Beverly Hills-area home of the late philanthropist and Hollywood socialite Rita Edelman, widow of producer Lou Edelman, has been listed at just under $1.8 million.

Rita Edelman, honorary lifetime president of the United Cerebral Palsy Assn. and a major fund-raiser for the Motion Picture and Television Fund, died at 90 on Nov. 3.

Her husband died at 75 in 1976. He was best known in TV as producer of “The Danny Thomas Show” (1953-1964). He also created the ‘60s series “The Big Valley.” Among his movies were “White Heat” (1949) and the biopic of songwriter Gus Kahn, “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (1951).

Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer was best man at the couple’s wedding in 1933. After that, Lou Edelman often brought Hollywood’s famous home for meals. Among the celebrities at the Edelmans’ table were Danny Thomas, Barbara Stanwyck, John Huston, James Cagney and Alan Ladd.

The Edelmans owned their Beverly Hills-area home for more than 35 years. It has three bedrooms plus maid’s quarters, a living room with high ceilings and a fireplace, a remodeled kitchen, an enclosed terrace, a walled entry and a pool. The 2,900-square-foot home also has canyon views from nearly every room.

Barbara Tenenbaum of Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills, has the listing.

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INSIDE

Laith Alsarraf and Chuck Roven