“Sometimes I’ve got to make a sacrifice,” he said.

Take locker rooms. Major League Baseball insisted on 400 square meters, about 4,300 square feet, per team. “For daily use, what’s the sense of that?” Mr. Broersen said, striding across the construction site, a hard hat bobbing on his head. “Or showers: I don’t need a shower room with 10 or 12 shower heads, but M.L.B. said, ‘I want it.’ ”

“So I’ll skip the automatic toilet flushing,” he said, exasperation evident in his voice, “to get the shower heads.”

Such compromising has pushed the project ahead nicely, but not without bizarre decisions.

Major League Baseball has sent some top consultants to assure that the ballpark meets its specifications. For the pitcher’s mound and batter’s circle, for instance, the league insisted on a special blend of clay, silt and gravel common in American ballparks (Fenway Park seems to have been the model), yet the mix could not be found in Europe.

So the Dutch, not without some grumbling, flew in 200 tons of it from Virginia, and consultants for Major League Baseball installed it. Dutch customs officials at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, totally perplexed by a shipment of that much clay, accompanied the trucks to the building site, apparently to make sure nothing else was concealed inside the neat plastic bundles.

On the less contentious question of outfield turf, both sides accepted a local solution. The league wanted a kind of bluegrass, common in American ballparks. Though the Dutch are hardly amateur gardeners — their companies handle the turf in major European soccer stadiums — it was only after much searching that Murray Cook, the official field consultant to Major League Baseball, accepted a local seed mix.