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The Spirit Lives
Nick Lopardo had his own way of doing things as a colorful investment banker on State Street. Now he's using his fortune to revive professional baseball in Lynn - his way.
By Gordon Edes and Maureen Mullen, 8/10/2003
t is one of those rare spring afternoons when it is not raining on the North Shore. Nicholas A. Lopardo, owner of the newest professional baseball team in the neighborhood, is standing at the top of the grandstand at Lynn's Fraser Field, watching groundskeeper Greg Arrington -- he formerly worked for the Boston Red Sox -- pull a rake around the first-base bag with his tractor.
"Hey," Lopardo bellows in a voice that could reach across Lynn Harbor to Nahant, "you missed a spot."
When he ruled as the hard-driving bad boy of State Street in the 1990s, turning the money-management arm of State Street Global Advisors into an international powerhouse, Lopardo used to arrange for his employees to get their shoes shined by a bootblack in the mall across the way. Now, in his latest incarnation as the owner of the North Shore Spirit, Lopardo, 56, has spent nearly $2 million of his own cash to renovate a rundown Lynn ballpark as the home field for his independent-league team. It is money he has invested in hopes of reviving baseball in an old factory town that can trace its connections to the game back to the Civil War but has been a graveyard for minor-league teams for the last 20 years. Lopardo is determined that he get the look right here, too.
That is why he has hired a 62-year-old no-nonsense former Red Sox infielder, John Kennedy, to manage his team, and two other former Sox players, Dick Radatz and Rich Gedman, to serve as his pitching coach and hitting instructor, respectively. And he may be the only owner in all of professional baseball whose wife advised the team's players that spitting and scratching would not be tolerated.
"She's mentioned it to me," says John Kelly, the team's best pitcher, a right-hander from Leominster who originally was signed by the Seattle Mariners and made it to Class AA -- just two rungs below the big leagues -- but spent the last four years pitching in Taiwan and Italy before coming home. "And she seemed serious about it."
The edict of Diane Lopardo, called the "supreme allied commander" by her husband of 35 years, flies in the face of an insular masculine world that has always made room for tobacco juice and protective cups. It would seem just as out of place in the previous world inhabited by her husband, one in which his underlings at State Street Global would routinely play pranks many deemed inappropriately sexist.
"Some of the folks around here will tell you I see every piece of dirt and every piece of paper," Lopardo is saying on a day his ballclub is playing in Elmira, New York, where he will take his private jet along with one of his partners, a former State Police trooper named Allen Melanson, to see the Spirit game that night.
On Easter Sunday, he says, he spent the afternoon cleaning the team's dugouts, though he jokes that at 285 pounds, he doesn't find it as easy to bend over as he once did. "I drive people nuts," he says. "I do drive people nuts, but it's the way it's got to be. This is such a passion, this is like a temple.
"I've got a young man who goes in there and cleans the dugouts before every ballgame, but I know what he does. He takes his garbage can down there and sweeps it. It looks clean to him, but it's not Nick Lopardo clean. Every step needs to be swept up. He doesn't see the dirt on the steps, because that's the way ballparks are, there's dirt on the steps. I keep having to say, 'That's not the way Nick Lopardo's ballparks are going to look.' "
Lopardo, who left State Street Global in 2001 after his mentor, Marshall N. Carter, retired and the company passed him over as CEO, is new to this business of owning a sports franchise. But a man who once bluffed a roomful of Teamster officials back when he was making his reputation managing their pension fund ("the Jimmy Hoffa fund," he calls it) for the government, then wowed State Street with his success, may have his sights set beyond a neighborhood ballpark in Lynn.
A close friend of former Boston Bruins hockey star Raymond Bourque -- in 2001, he flew Bourque home from Colorado in a company-owned jet, Stanley Cup in tow, a final act of extravagance that preceded his departure from State Street Global -- Lopardo admits to interest in running a major-league franchise, in either baseball or hockey. "I didn't plan it that way," he says. "I didn't think about that. Would I like to do it if the opportunity presented itself? I might like to do it."
Gregory Ahearn, who worked for eight years with Lopardo at State Street Global as the head of external affairs, calls the Spirit "just an entry-level thing" for Lopardo. "He won't stop there. I'm willing to predict he'll be a major-league owner."
But first, there is a scrap of paper to be picked up on the third-base concourse, a young usher to be told how to greet a fan, and a game to be won. The Nick Lopardo way.
WHEN IT OPENED IN 1940, Fraser Field was hailed as a gem of a ballpark, a tribute to the rich history of minor-league baseball in Lynn. Combined with the adjacent Manning Bowl football stadium, it offered a sports complex that was unrivaled in the area.
Few communities can claim the baseball tradition this blue-collar city can: Regularly scheduled games were held on Lynn Common in the 1860s; the first time a catcher's mask was worn was in Lynn in 1877; at least seven players with Lynn ties -- Blondy Ryan, Bump Hadley, Johnny Pesky, Jim Hegan and his son Mike, Billy Conigliaro, and Kenny Hill -- have played in the World Series.
Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige, Pesky, and two tragic figures -- Tony Conigliaro and Harry Agganis -- are just a few of the stars who have graced the city's diamonds. And long before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947, Bud Fowler played three games for the Lynn Live Oaks, a minor-league team, in May 1878, temporarily crossing the line that excluded African-Americans from professional baseball.
"There was more acceptance of black players in baseball right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction," says James Riley, author of The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. "But even in the Northeast things weren't good for blacks, and from 1885 through the turn of the century, they were systematically excluded from organized baseball."
Nearly 50 years later, Lynn made its mark again on baseball history by hosting the first night baseball game -- eight years before Major League Baseball turned on the lights in Cincinnati's Crosley Field. On June 25, 1927, Lynn's entry in the New England League beat Salem's club, 7-2, in a seven-inning game under lights at the General Electric field in West Lynn. Bucky Harris, manager of the Washington Senators, and Bill Carrigan, the Red Sox skipper, were among those in attendance.
The Cornet All-Stars, a traveling semi-pro team, began play at Lynn's Little River Park in 1912, were well known throughout the region, and captured several New England League championships. It has been reported that it was common for crowds of 10,000 to watch the All-Stars.
The city broke new ground with the building of Fraser Field. Tucked in a neighborhood of single- and multi-family homes mixed with retail shops and industrial businesses, Fraser is virtually hidden from street view. The field was built as part of the Works Project Administration at a cost of approximately $210,000, and its design was considered unique for that time. Fraser's cantilevered concrete roof covering part of the grandstand was believed to be the first of its kind in the United States -- joining Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro as the only cities with similar stadiums.
The park hosted its first game on June 18, 1940, when the Lynn Frasers took on the Pittsburgh Pirates in an exhibition game. Nearly 6,500 fans paid from 15 cents to 75 cents to watch the Pirates, who received a $1,000 appearance fee, handily beat the Frasers, 10-1, with a lineup that included Arkie Vaughan and Vince DiMaggio, brother of Joe and Dom, who delivered the park's first home run.
"Lynn has a great minor-league history," says Red Sox legend Pesky. "You don't see anything like that anymore."
Pesky, who would stop to watch minor league games in Lynn on his way home from playing at Fenway Park, played in Lynn several times, including a 1942 exhibition game pitting the Red Sox against a Lynn team. In one game, with a runner on second, Pesky attempted the hidden ball trick and caught the runner off guard for an out. Lynn manager Pip Kennedy successfully argued to the umpire that the trick was not allowed in his league. The runner was allowed to return to second base and later scored what would be the winning run.
"Well, I wasn't too happy about it at the time," says Pesky, now a special-assignment instructor with the Red Sox, "but I laughed about it later."
Fraser has been home to several minor-league teams -- the Lynn Red Sox in the 1940s, the Sailors (a Seattle Mariner affiliate) and the Lynn Pirates (Pittsburgh) in the '80s, and the independent Massachusetts Mad Dogs in the '90s. But by then, Fraser Field was decaying. The seats, where there were seats, were falling apart. The cantilevered concrete roof was crumbling. The dugouts were unusable.
"I played there in 1999 when I was with Waterbury [Connecticut]," says Spirit pitcher John Kelly. "It should have been torn down. It was junk."
WHEN FORMER ACTING Governor Jane Swift shook up the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in 2002, one of her new appointees was Nick Lopardo. His reputation as an investment wizard had not diminished since his parting from State Street Global Advisors the year before, and his involvement in a series of sexual discrimination suits apparently had not made him a political liability.
Lopardo spent 18 years as an institutional pension salesman for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then grew the money-management arm of State Street Corp. from $18 billion in assets when he took over in 1987 to more than $700 billion before he left and began his own management firm, Susquehanna Capital Management Group.
"We were on a mission," he recalls. "We were nobody in 1987. We were less than 2 percent of the whole bottom line. Nobody ever thought of State Street as a money-management firm. When I folded up and left, we were the sixth-largest money-management firm in the world. You couldn't go anywhere in the world where people didn't at least recognize [State Street Global]. That's a huge sense of accomplishment for all the guys and gals that worked with me. To put that thing together, that was an incredible statement."
Lopardo was compensated well for his success -- he received an $11.5 million severance payout upon his departure from State Street Global and held more than 100,000 shares of stock when he left. His worth has been estimated in the $40 million to $50 million range, which has enabled him to maintain a lifestyle that includes the ownership of two private planes, homes on the North Shore (in Boxford, where he used to be neighbors with Bourque), in Florida and Vermont, two lots on the island of Hawaii, and membership in seven country clubs (a former single-digit handicap, Lopardo says he has had time to play just 20 rounds in the last three years).
"I don't have as much money as the Reeboks and the Krafts -- that's a different league from me," he says. "Am I comfortable? Yeah, I'm very comfortable. Do I have a plane? Do I have some gorgeous homes and vacation homes? Yeah. I just built a brand-new home in Sanibel Island [Florida] at the Sanctuary Golf Club there. I just had Ray and Christine Bourque there. . . . When she walked through the front door, she turned to Ray and said, 'Ray, you stopped playing too early.' "
Lopardo, the son of a scrap-metal shop owner in Brooklyn, New York, lived in San Francisco, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania while working for Equitable. He brought a different sensibility to the buttoned-down world of State Street.
"State Street was this dowdy regional bank, a family business whose primary business was custodial accounts for blue-blood New England families," Ahearn says. "And here was Nick, a real piece of work, one of these larger-than-life figures who literally became a legend in the industry, a hard-charging entrepreneur in a staid industry. He really chafed against the culture there, the bean-counter types running the organization."
Lopardo was loud, he was "very emotional in an Italian don fashion," Ahearn says, he was paternalistic. And according to a half-dozen complaints filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, he turned a blind eye to practices unacceptable to his female employees.
The most notorious of these complaints became known as the "Case of the Pink Pump." According to an affidavit filed by a former portfolio manager at State Street Global, a woman's high-heel shoe was left on the desk of any man in the firm's international equity operation who went home instead of drinking after work with his colleagues. In an another incident that may have eclipsed the Pink Pump in its titillation quotient, a State Street Global vice president allegedly installed an audio recording of Meg Ryan's restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally in a computer on the trading floor, so that the computer broadcast her orgasmic moans whenever a particular key was touched.
A third case involved a manager of State Street Global's fixed-income operations area, who says she was demoted after returning from a maternity leave in 1993. In a 1998 deposition taken in connection with that complaint, Lopardo answered "I don't recall" in more than 80 instances, and he was chided in the media for his arrogance and evasiveness.
The case was settled after an MCAD finding of probable cause. Lopardo remains unapologetic about all of it today, noting that was the only case resolved in the complainant's favor.
"The Pink Pump was very simple. We had a lot of young MBAs -- this was their internal way of ridiculing a guy who didn't go out drinking with them the night before because they had to stay home," he says. "Quite frankly, there were one or two women who went along until it became an opportune time for somebody to complain about it."
Lopardo banned the practice. Male employees "couldn't understand why I was so upset about it. They couldn't understand why I was blowing this thing way out of proportion, and I said I'm blowing it out of proportion because people will blow it out of proportion. I finally said, 'It stops, or the next time anybody's involved, you're out of here.' I took a lot of hits from the male population" at State Street Global.
The deposition? He wouldn't do anything differently.
"You know what the attorney told me? 'Nick, if you don't remember the exact words, the exact facts, you don't say you know.' But it was a deposition. It was a deposition.
"The whole Harry Met Sally thing? The person who brought that recording into the trading room was a woman" -- his voice rises for emphasis -- "not a man. A young lady on the trading desk got upset -- a Middle Eastern gal who culturally didn't get the significance of the Harry Met Sally scene and was upset by it. But no one ever got the facts."
Another former State Street Global employee, David Smith, took his grievance onto the Internet with a website on which he regularly attacked Lopardo. Smith says he was fired after reporting that a co-worker broke into the company's electronic mail system, discovering that Smith and another State Street Global employee were gay and were partners. He also filed complaints with the MCAD and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging that he was a victim of discrimination based both on his sexual orientation and his physical disability (Crohn's disease). Neither agency acted on those complaints.
opardo, who played shortstop in baseball and fullback in football while at Susquehanna University, where he was graduated in 1968, contributed $1 million in 1999 toward a new football and track stadium bearing his name at the Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, campus. But he resigned as chairman of the school's board of directors after the women's field hockey coach, Connie Harnum, demanded that her team be allowed to play there, too.
"We were flying in my aircraft with the president down to talk to another potential board member about joining the board and he said we have a problem," Lopardo says. "I said, 'What's the problem?' He said, 'The women's field hockey coach wants to play all of her home games at the stadium and wants to paint lines on the field.' I said, 'So what's the problem?' He said, 'I just told you what the problem is.' I said, 'There's no problem, I said that wasn't the deal.' He said, 'They're threatening to make it a Title IX thing and threatening to go to the press with it.' I said, 'This is not a Title IX issue.'
"Now you've got to understand, the field hockey coach is the wife of the athletic director, so the athletic director wasn't taking a firm stance on this. Then they upped and retired this year, so they're now gone, and all the young ladies who put up a stink last year, they're all gone.
"But six years from now, when we have a problem with the paint, it's down there settling on the bottom of the turf so it won't drain, you know who they're going to call? 'Nick, we have a problem with the field.'
"I resigned from the board. They went ahead and painted it, and I left the board. I said, 'I can't be involved with this when you go and do things like that, which isn't right, and you don't even come and ask Diane and I. We made the contribution. We built it.' "
The Susquehanna field hockey team finished last season, Connie Harnum's last as coach, ranked No. 7 in the country in the NCAA Division III national rankings, and school officials credited playing on the turf surface as a key reason for its success.
opardo didn't get into the sports ownership business with the intention of bringing a baseball team to Lynn. He wasn't looking for a baseball team, and he wasn't necessarily looking at Lynn. His original plans were to own a minor-league hockey team, perhaps an American Hockey League affiliate of a National Hockey League organization. He quickly figured out that owning an affiliated team would not fit into the Nick Lopardo way of doing things.
"We looked at Springfield, Worcester, Lowell," Lopardo says of American Hockey League teams, "and found out really quickly you spend 3, 4, 5, 6 million bucks, maybe 8 million, versus the 300,000 that I bought this ballclub for. There, you buy a team, you own the uniforms. You don't own the concessions, you don't own the parking, you don't have a lease like I have here -- 20 years for a dollar a year. You start doing the math. If I'm going to take a shot, let's take the first shot here."
A chance meeting almost two years ago between Lopardo and Bob Wirz, who at the time was a co-owner of the Waterbury Spirit baseball team in the independent Northern League, led Lopardo to the baseball business. The Spirit weren't doing well, the owners wanted to sell, and they gave Lopardo enough of a deal to make it worth trying.
The team would play in the newly renamed Northeast League, which had originally begun in 1995 as a six-team league based entirely in New York State, merged for several years with the independent Northern League, then split away before this season as an eight-team league, with franchises as far-flung as Quebec and Bangor, and with three teams in Massachusetts: the Brockton Rox, the Berkshire Black Bears, and Lopardo's team. Fully independent -- that is, not affiliated with a major-league organization -- the Northeast League has sent three players to the big leagues -- pitchers Joey Eischen, Joe Grahe, and Joel Bennett -- and has nearly two dozen alumni playing in major-league organizations. The quality of play is equal to mid-tier minor-league baseball.
Lopardo and his partners looked at several sites in eastern New England for their team to call home, including Fall River and Manchester, New Hampshire, as well as Lynn. Lopardo had planned to build a new stadium, but the league could not wait.
The Northern League had given Lopardo until 2005 to start playing. But then the league expanded to include a franchise in Bangor, creating an odd number of teams, which is a schedule maker's nightmare. League officials asked the Spirit to begin play this season, accelerating the team's search for a home and leading it back to Lynn and dilapidated Fraser Field.
Lopardo told city officials last August that he intended to make the upgrades and vowed the money would come from his pocket. The result was a $2 million face lift and a virtual reconstruction of the park, restoring it to a 21st-century version of its former beauty -- with video scoreboard, synthetic turf infield, new press box, seats, dugouts, clubhouses, management offices, concession stands, restrooms, and high-tech infrastructure.
"The capital investment, to me, I consider that a contribution that I really made to some charitable cause that I might have been involved in anyway," says Lopardo, a major supporter of the Salvation Army, local youth programs, and the Landmark School in Beverly, for children with language-based learning disabilities.
His partner Melanson, a 22-year veteran of the State Police, worked as a bodyguard at State Street Global, including two years serving in that role for Lopardo, who didn't like the idea of having a bodyguard. "It went from a work relationship to a friendship," says Melanson, who describes his own stake in the club as a "very, very insignificant, small investment."
When Lopardo first announced his plans, many people -- local officials, league officials, and at least one of his coaches -- were skeptical about the possibility of success where others had failed.
Northeast League commissioner Miles Wolff was one of the skeptics who are in the process of being converted. "Lynn had failed in the league before, and you know the site is sort of sitting in the middle of that city block, so it's not a very visible site, and the parking, it's all those things," says Wolff, explaining his reluctance about the league's return to Lynn.
But after a recent visit to the upgraded Fraser Field, Wolff was pleasantly surprised. "I'm amazed," he says. "Everything is so much better -- the field, the concessions. It's so much more inviting."
Spirit first-base coach Jim Tgettis, a Lynn resident and baseball coach at Lynn Classical High, was also among the converts. "I had heard what others were going to do for Lynn in the past, and all I ever saw them do was take things," Tgettis says. "But when I really saw the sincerity of what we're going to do here, I found myself getting excited again about professional baseball here."
And so Lynn and the North Shore now have a team whose salary cap of $87,500, for the whole roster of 22 players, is less than a third of the major-league minimum for one player, $300,000. Yuri Sanchez, the shortstop, is a graduate of Lynn Tech and a product of the Detroit, Cincinnati, New York Mets, and Cleveland farm systems as well as two other independent teams. The catcher, Frank Charles, was recently released by the Red Sox Triple-A team in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The general manager, Ben Wittkowski, is just 26 years old but has several years' experience in baseball front offices.
The team finds its players through a preseason league tryout camp in Florida and its own preseason tryouts; it also employs a talent scout. In addition, there are 25 full-time employees (including Lopardo's son-in-law Peter Welch) and a pool of 200 part-time employees, not insignificant in a city that has been hard hit by a tough economy.
First baseman Fran Riordan, 27, joined the team after leaving the Richmond (Indiana) Roosters of the Frontier League because of the league's age restrictions. A three-time Frontier League all-star, he was a teammate of Morgan Burkhart's; Burkhart was with the Red Sox organization for two seasons.
"You don't play six or seven years of independent baseball without absolutely loving the game," Riordan says. "There are a lot of obstacles to overcome. Sometimes you live with a host family, which is OK if you're 20 or 21, just getting out of school. Or they put you in one of these horrible little apartments where you share two rooms with four guys.
"But here it's not like that," Riordan continues. "Everything is first class, top of the line. We're treated very well. Nick Lopardo is at the ballpark every day. Every day while you're taking batting practice, you see him helping to clean the stadium, doing anything that needs to be done around the stadium to make it better. He's hands-on in a good way. He's a very positive person."
Lopardo estimates that to break even this season, the team must draw 2,000 to 2,200 fans a night. So far, the Spirit is attracting only about 1,600 fans a game to Fraser, even though behind Kelly's undefeated pitching they won their division in the first half of the season, ensuring them a playoff berth.
Jonathan Fleisig, owner of the Berkshire Black Bears, the Spirit's Northeast League rival, also owned the Massachusetts Mad Dogs when they called Fraser Field home. He calls his time in Lynn bittersweet. "I lost money but made friends and learned a lot," he wrote recently in an e-mail from Russia. "City and people were great. The economy was tough, and I believe that I would have been successful if not for the structure being condemned."
He also believes in Lopardo's chances for success. "Only time will tell," Fleisig wrote. "But Nick is a winner. I wouldn't bet against him."
To those who would doubt his potential for success in Lynn, Lopardo offers a simple challenge: "Walk up the steps, take a look, and then you tell me what's different from the Sailors, the Mad Dogs, and the others that have tried to do it here before."
t is a Sunday afternoon, and it is raining again. Nick Lopardo is standing in the outfield, umbrella in his hand, and he is angry. The Spirit, who had to call off their home opener because of the weather, have their biggest advance sale since that night, more than 2,200 tickets sold, but Lopardo senses that he will have no choice but to call this one off, too. It will be the team's fifth postponement, and it's only mid-June.
"This is killing me," he says. "It's not so much the weather at game time that kills you. It's the damn weather forecasters during the week with their weather forecasts that make people plan to do something else because they think it's going to rain. It's killing me at the gate."
Lopardo, who is sponsoring a four-team women's baseball league at Fraser Field, has visions of building a hockey arena on the Lynnway, right on the water with spectacular views of downtown Boston, and attracting an independent-league team. He also is talking about a women's soccer team.
He was approached once about investing in the Red Sox but passed. "I talked to -- who's the guy who ran the ski thing, Les" -- Les Otten, a limited partner -- "the guy who took a back seat. I talked to Les. He talked about a $35 million share, with 10 people having shares. I'm sitting there. Why would I put $35 million in one place and be one of 10 minority owners? I can't be a one-10th minority owner. I don't work very well when I'm not really involved in making the policy decisions. I've had 35 years around business to know if I'm not running the show, I'm not interested in it."
Andy Seguin is the Spirit's ticket manager. What is it like to work for Lopardo, whose reputation for dressing down employees was legendary on State Street? "I'd work for him anytime, anyplace," he says. "He takes care of me. He takes care of all of us. But he wants perfection in an imperfect world. There are no rainouts in money management."
This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 8/10/2003.
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