How much money the city has spent, or has lost in tax revenues, to build this ballpark is sharply disputed.
"I'm sorry we built this amazing ballpark and fans are feeling the way they do," he told a select group of scribes.
And while the ski slope is being built, the ballpark has stalled and has been dismissed by critics as simply a lure to gain approval for the project.
Ebbets, who built the ballpark named for him that opened in 1913, had been a ticket seller, clerk and briefly the manager before he bought the Dodgers (Brooklynites were known as trolley dodgers) for $30,000 in 1898.
But the public won't build the ballpark at Xanadu.
Ebbets had to move secretly to build the ballpark to keep the cost of the land from quickly soaring.
And on Friday, The Miami Herald reported that the U.S. United States Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed records from Miami-Dade Covery and Miami over the deal to build the ballpark, including financial information backing almost $500 million in bond sales.
The Essex County Improvement Authority, an arm of the county government, issued the bonds to build the ballpark and reserved for the county the right to sell the stadium's 20 skyboxes and its naming rights.
Build yourself a time machine, head back to 1975, get on an old steam locomotive full of cattle cars and whiskey-soaked gamblers, get off where the stadium footprint will go, hop back in your time machine, and watch as they build the ballpark around you.
Profile The Atlanta Braves' new $672 stadium in Cobb County, expected to be finished in 2017, will use nearly $372 million of public money to build the ballpark.
