For baseball fans, Greg Maddux ranks as one of the top pitchers to have played the game — a surefire bet for Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame when he's eligible for election next year, based on his 23 seasons for the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Cubs and two other teams from 1986 to 2008.

For nonfans, he's an interesting one: He didn't throw hard, at least for most of his career, yet he won more games than all but seven pitchers ever and struck out more hitters than all but nine of them. He wore glasses, though usually not while pitching. He's known as one of the most cerebral athletes of all time.

And yet there's one addition to the Maddux Myth we've yet to account for. In the living room of his 8,404-square-foot Las Vegas mansion, listed for $2.25 million, "Mad Dog" proudly displays a merry-go-round horse.

Another month, another set of inconclusive housing data.

Let's start with the latest: Freddie Mac announced today that the average interest rate on a 30-year fixed loan fell to 3.75% for the week from 3.78% the week prior. This marks the sixth-straight week in which that rate has touched a record low. It last ticked up for the week ending April 24.

Meanwhile, the average rate on a 15-year fixed-rate loan hit 2.97% — the first time it has been below 3% since Freddie Mac started keeping track in 1991, according to MarketWatch.

Maybe this will help home prices increase: In some parts of the world, a cool billion dollars won't even buy you a house in which you can sleep at night.

That's apparently the case in Mumbai, where Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India and among the 20 wealthiest people in the world, reportedly will not spend a night on any of the 27 floors of his tower, named Antilia. He, his mother, his wife and their three children instead pass their days in the building, then move to a 14-story home called Sea Wind to sleep, reports the "Architizer" blog.

By the way, when it was completed for $1 billion, Antilia was the most expensive home ever built.

The trickling of home sales from the so-called "shadow inventory" of distressed properties onto the housing market continues to play games with national home-price data.

The S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index, released today (PDF), registered a 2% drop in the first quarter of this year from the fourth quarter of 2011. Prices were down 1.9% from the same quarter a year earlier. They have hit their lowest point since the 2006 housing crisis, leading Forbes to dub the "double dip" as dipping further.

Meanwhile, Case-Shiller's 20-city index was "basically unchanged" from February to March; the 10-city index was down just 0.1%.

What can we glean from that? As Time's Alison Rogers notes, looking behind the numbers may yield some positives from today's report.

Arguably the only car race that nonrace fans may acknowledge, Sunday's Indianapolis 500 has been one of Memorial Day weekend's staples since its first running in 1911.

If you can't make it out to the track, what better place to enjoy it than the eight-bedroom, 11-bath mansion of a former race winner?

That could be the bounty for the buyer of 1986 Indy 500 winner Bobby Rahal's 13,192-square-foot mansion in New Albany, Ohio, outside Columbus. Built in 1995 on an eight-acre lot, it's listed for $3.5 million. According to the Chicago Tribune, it has been up for grabs since at least late 2010, when it was listed for $4.75 million.

Ah, the sounds and smells of spring: birds chirping, flowers blooming, subcontractors hammering and fresh ink hitting paper.

After a decrease in March, sales of new homes increased 3.3% in April, the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development reported today. The seasonally adjusted rate of 343,000 homes sold also represents a 9.9% increase from April 2011.

Get used to the slight increases: They are “in line with our expectations for a continued, modest increase in home sales as buyers gain confidence in the economy and their jobs,” David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, told MSNBC.

In April, homebuying season begins in earnest for most regions, and last month was no exception: Existing-home sales increased 3.4% in April from March, hitting a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.62 million, the National Association of Realtors said. That was 10% higher than in April 2011.

Meanwhile, the median sale price for existing homes increased 3.1% in April from March to $177,400; that was a 10.1% jump from April 2011. Coupled with March's price increase, this marks the first two-month period of back-to-back year-to-year price increases since mid-2010, the NAR says. Earlier this month, the NAR reported that 74 of the 146 largest U.S. metropolitan areas showed a price increase from the first quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of this year.

The most encouraging news, however, could come in the breakdown of who's paying for these homes.

Nearly six months after 4.1 million homeowners were offered independent reviews of their foreclosure cases, only about 165,000, about 4%, have accepted the offer.

The reviews were part of a deal made last year involving 14 loan servicers and the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in the wake of the robo-signing scandal. If a review finds that a homeowner suffered financially because of improper foreclosure practices, the homeowner could receive compensation ranging from several hundred to thousands of dollars.

Why haven't more borrowers sought reviews? Suggestions range from the form of the letters sent by federal banking regulators offering the reviews to misunderstanding to homeowner cynicism, since the reviewers are hired by the banks.