Stranger Than Fiction: Behind the Scenes of the Yankees Wife-Swap Scandal

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 3 No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor.

Speaker 1 Right after this ad.

Speaker 5 You're listening to DraftKings Network.

Speaker 1 Dave Mandel, I should say that I have been on a bit of an odyssey that has led me to you.

Speaker 7 Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 Well, uh-oh, in a couple of senses that I want to explore and excavate with you, but how should I introduce you? Because there's a lot to introduce, I suppose.

Speaker 8 I don't know. You know, sometimes I feel like,

Speaker 8 you know, you can kind of just go in chronological order, or you can just kind of go what my, I guess, tombstone will say, which is the guy that wrote the Bizarro Jerry.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's sort of, I think, how I'm gonna, that's sort of as good as it's gonna get vis-a-vis death. So, yeah.

Speaker 9 Okay, so Bizarro Jerry, if you are not familiar, is one of the greatest episodes of one of the greatest television shows in American history.

Speaker 12 And Dave Mandel, longtime Seinfeld writer, was in fact responsible.

Speaker 7 So he's Bizarro Jerry.

Speaker 14 Bizarro Jerry?

Speaker 15 Yeah, like Bizarro Superman. Superman's exact opposite,

Speaker 15 who lives in the backwards Bizarro world.

Speaker 15 Up is down, down is up. He says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.

Speaker 5 Shouldn't he say badby?

Speaker 7 Isn't that the opposite of goodbye?

Speaker 15 No, it's still goodbye.

Speaker 1 Does he live underwater?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 5 Is he black?

Speaker 4 Look, just forget the whole thing, all right?

Speaker 13 But the reason today's Odyssey has brought me to Dave Mandel is not because he has written for Seinfeld and The Simpsons and Saturday Live and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Veep, all of which he did.

Speaker 2 The reason I'm talking to Dave Mandel is because Dave is the key to telling a story that I have been trying to report out for a very, very, very long time.

Speaker 6 A story that actually feels like it was taken from the bizarro universe of sports, an upside-down world where the most insane transaction I have ever heard of actually occurred

Speaker 26 as Matt Damon is well aware.

Speaker 27 A couple of quick questions about you getting

Speaker 27 doing a production deal with Ben Aflak kind of going back in business again.

Speaker 27 True or false are you gonna make a movie together where you play wife swapping Yankees?

Speaker 27 There is a it's a true story actually,

Speaker 27 but I haven't seen a script for that one yet.

Speaker 13 But I am here to tell you that this script does exist.

Speaker 13 It never got made, but it does exist. And I know this because Dave Mandel is not just the guy who wrote it and who sent it to me.

Speaker 23 Dave Mandel is the guy who spent years researching this.

Speaker 30 And that's the part I really cared about.

Speaker 20 Because yes, as Matt Damon was alluding to just then to CBS, the story of the Yankee wife swap.

Speaker 25 is a true story.

Speaker 18 It is the real life tale of two best friends, two real-life starting pitchers for the New York Yankees, my favorite team, named Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekic.

Speaker 31 And Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekic in the 1970s actually

Speaker 9 decided

Speaker 23 to switch wives.

Speaker 1 And so how is it, David Mandel, that you got involved with the story of the Yankee wife swap?

Speaker 8 It's funny. It actually goes back to Seinfeld, which is Peter Melman, who is one of the longtime Seinfeld writers.
He and I wrote episodes together. We wrote the backwards episode of Seinfeld.

Speaker 8 We wrote that, we co-wrote that together and, you know, friends, whatever, all those good things. I am Peter Melman, longtime sports fan and

Speaker 8 occasional writer. And I used to hang out in his office and he had this wonderful book on his coffee table in his office.

Speaker 8 like a baseball card sort of coffee table book, like history of baseball cards. So I would just pick this book up literally every time I was in the office, like with no agenda of any sort.

Speaker 8 And at some point or another, I land on a page that basically has a picture of Mike Kekic and Fritz Peterson's cards. And I had never heard the story.

Speaker 8 I was born in 1970, so it happened obviously when I was a little kid. I'd never heard the story.
Dave grew up in Manhattan, and

Speaker 8 I think he grew up on scandal.

Speaker 8 And,

Speaker 8 you know, so anything I could tell him storywise that was somewhat scandalous or lurid, especially lurid, he just loved it. So

Speaker 8 I kind of remember being excited to tell him about Mike Kekic and Fritz Peterson. In 1973, the Yankees were in the eighth year.
of an unprecedented run of being horrible

Speaker 8 and

Speaker 8 nobody was paying attention to them. The announcers were barely involved in the game.
And all of a sudden, it comes out that two pitchers on the team, two lefties,

Speaker 8 have swapped families, not just wives. They swapped their entire families.
And I just go, what is this? And he goes, no, no, no, it's a real story.

Speaker 8 And I kind of walked out of that just going, holy crap, that seems like it would be a great movie.

Speaker 8 I mean, it's, it's, I mean, I know it sounds silly, but it's as simple as, boy, that sounds like a great movie.

Speaker 8 At the time, in the 70s, there was a sense that lefties were a little kooky. So these two guys were considered within their team, a little bit of characters, Kekic, especially.

Speaker 8 Fritz Peterson was the more straight-laced of the two. Kekic was a wilder character.
There's a period of time where he was just always walking around with a tennis racket. He was kooky.

Speaker 8 So there were definitely

Speaker 8 one of them seemed more, if you will, the straighter guy, and one was more a little bit the devil, if you will.

Speaker 2 So I need you to know that Dave's story, his reporting here, hinges on these exclusive in-depth conversations that he personally had with the quieter and straighter-laced Fritz Peterson.

Speaker 21 And at every turn, we've been fact-checking this.

Speaker 11 I've been spending weeks doing this now, confirming, for instance, that Fritz, whose wife's name was Marilyn, and Mike Kekic, whose wife's name was Susan,

Speaker 18 really were this genuine duo, this pair of best friends and road roommates who were constantly hanging out and were also both the fathers of two little kids.

Speaker 34 But one of their Yankees teammates told me that while Fritz was the better player, Mike Kekic was wilder, on the mound, and crucially in romance.

Speaker 30 Mike was visibly more confident, more experienced, more aggressive in that realm.

Speaker 14 And very late one evening, in July 1972, both the Petersons and the Kekices found themselves at a house party thrown by a sports writer for the New York Post.

Speaker 34 Because in the 70s, apparently, sports writers and athletes would actually socialize and hang out.

Speaker 11 And this is what Fritz Peterson would tell a radio show many years later about what happened that fateful night at around 2 or 3 a.m.

Speaker 38 We were all drinking beer and having

Speaker 38 hot dogs, yeah. And it got real late, and we went out to our cars.
Mike and I had come in separate cars with our wives

Speaker 38 and we happened to be parked behind each other in the street. And I said, as we walked out, I saw Marilyn and Mike walking a little bit ahead.

Speaker 33 Because again, Mike was more aggressive, but Fritz was a good teammate.

Speaker 38 And I said, hey, why don't you, Marilyn, why don't you go back to the moment?

Speaker 3 At the time, your wife is Marilyn.

Speaker 38 Yes. Ride with Mike to the diner in Fort Lee where we had met before we came.
And I said, Susan, will go with me and we'll just meet you back there.

Speaker 8 There was this mutual decision, very

Speaker 8 both fake and yet organic, of why don't I drive your wife and why don't you drive my wife?

Speaker 8 Go off and basically, for lack of a better word, go to a malt shop and kind of go on like a very like 1950s date, but in a very happy, dreamy, romantic way.

Speaker 8 And Kekic and Marilyn disappear for two hours.

Speaker 1 And then two hours later,

Speaker 38 fill in the blanks, mike kekic emerges with with with marilyn fritz's wife we just had a very good time you know right actually innocently right and the next day we were back at the ballpark this was a this was a friday and we said you know that was really fun let's do it again there's an element almost if memory serves of them kind of almost like cheating behind each other's backs with each other's spouse a little bit.

Speaker 8 Then it becomes sort of more organized. Then they try and put an end to it because rumors are getting out.
And then ultimately,

Speaker 8 they just are like, it doesn't matter. I love her.
I want to be with her.

Speaker 8 I love him. I want to be with him.
Vice versa.

Speaker 11 And so I do need to clarify here that these two couples, these two Yankee couples, weren't just swingers.

Speaker 13 I mean, look, it wasn't just the 70s.

Speaker 10 That's not entirely what the story is about here. By Fritz's own admission, the physical electricity between his wife Marilyn and his best friend Mike had been undeniable by this point.

Speaker 14 And Fritz Peterson, by the way, was clearly falling for Sue Kekic

Speaker 25 as well.

Speaker 11 And so by 1973, after all of these little stops and starts, these considerations, the framework of the trade, as Dave Mandel would title his screenplay, got hammered out in real life and agreed upon, co-signed by these four friends in equal parts.

Speaker 34 And no, they weren't swapping wives.

Speaker 10 That's, I think, still the biggest misconception about the whole deal here.

Speaker 40 The Petersons and the Kekitches were actually swapping husbands.

Speaker 19 Everything else in their households, according to the trade, their children, their pets, their furniture, their houses, would remain as it was with Marilyn and Sue.

Speaker 18 It was just a matter of, you know,

Speaker 36 a pitching change.

Speaker 41 My name is Rick Dempsey.

Speaker 41 My position, I'm a catcher. I joined the Yankees as a catcher in 1972

Speaker 41 through 76.

Speaker 33 And Rick's job, in the most literal sense, was to know what Fritz and Mike were going to throw at him.

Speaker 41 I get it occasionally. Every couple of years, somebody will say, oh, weren't you there when Mike Haskins and Fritz Peterson were there? And I go, yeah, I was there

Speaker 41 when it all happened.

Speaker 41 It was probably the biggest news in all of baseball at that time that people would trade everything, even the dogs and the cats.

Speaker 1 How did you learn that the swap was happening?

Speaker 41 Well, they called a meeting in the clubhouse to talk about it, you know, and

Speaker 41 from vaguely what I remember is they were asking us not to talk too much about it, you know, just to kind of let it go. So when people asked us, well, what do you know about it?

Speaker 41 We basically said, you know, we don't know about it. You know, we've only heard about it, what we've read about it in the papers and what the media has been talking about in the clubhouse.

Speaker 41 That's basically it. Other than that,

Speaker 41 I think by that time, the owner, George Steinbroter, had asked everybody to just kind of shy away from it.

Speaker 21 Which became impossibly difficult on account of the fact that one day during spring training in 1973 in Florida, the Yankees broke the news of the trade by holding two separate press conferences, one with Mike Kekic at 10 a.m.

Speaker 21 and one with Fritz Peterson at 4 p.m.

Speaker 35 A truly unprecedented double header for the PR staffer in charge.

Speaker 42 I'm Marty Appell,

Speaker 42 longtime historian for the New York Yankees, originally their public relations director and television producer. And I've written a lot of books on the Yankees and their history, among other things.

Speaker 42 So

Speaker 42 now I'm reduced to kind of doing Zoom interviews on the subject of the Yankees.

Speaker 24 But you should probably know that Marty was 24 years old on the day in question.

Speaker 42 You don't have a lot of preparation for moments like this, and we didn't have a written press release that we put out at all.

Speaker 42 Today, you would have almost been forced to confront a room of 100 journalists. Back then, there were the six or seven beat writers who were covering spring training.

Speaker 42 Some phone calls came through, but it was the era before

Speaker 42 even People magazine, let alone Extra and the Inside Edition and all of that. It was like a five-day story in the New York tabloids.
Front page, there had been an outing the previous summer

Speaker 42 on an off day where we had all gone out on a yacht for a cruise out in New York Harbor. And the Petersons and the Kekages were in the photograph together.

Speaker 42 So that became sort of, haha, we got a photo of them.

Speaker 8 And then eventually, almost a week later, as memory serves, Johnny Carson makes his first joke about it.

Speaker 43 You know, the sports writers have been saying a long time they had to do something to make baseball more interesting.

Speaker 43 And this is really it.

Speaker 43 I understand Fritz is getting Mike's wife, plus

Speaker 43 a child to be named later.

Speaker 1 Well, part of what my research was indicating as I was like looking into how it was reported on at the time is to your recollection and to Fritz Peterson's recollection at least,

Speaker 1 he's the guy who seemed to be like, Hey,

Speaker 7 look, this isn't that weird, right?

Speaker 1 Like, this doesn't have to be that weird. He wanted to sort of

Speaker 1 normalize this despite the monologue jokes, besides the fact that, again, they had swapped husbands and the dogs and the kids and the houses and the furniture.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, you know, that was all going to stay the same.

Speaker 3 No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor.

Speaker 3 now when a yankee gets traded away his wife stays with the team

Speaker 43 you know it's gonna be a strange year in baseball ump says play ball and everybody throws their keys into the ballpark

Speaker 29 so no in other words fritz's plea for understanding his big plea to respect his bond with susan as this mature decision

Speaker 11 It failed to work on anyone.

Speaker 28 It failed to work on Bob Hope.

Speaker 20 It failed to work on Johnny Carson because, of course.

Speaker 19 But the narrative around the trade did start changing pretty soon on account of a crucial plot twist, as our guy Marty recalls.

Speaker 42 What happened in the immediate days after was that

Speaker 42 Fritz and Susan Kekic did hit it off, did truly love each other a lot. As for Mike, it didn't last out the week.
They just came to realize this was not a good idea.

Speaker 42 Let's put things back the way they were, but it was too late. He couldn't put it back the way they were.
So it became bitter and terrible feelings.

Speaker 42 And that's when it became apparent that one of them was going to have to get traded.

Speaker 21 Within a week, it was obvious that Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson both had buyers' remorse, essentially. This was just within days of those dual press conferences and spring training.

Speaker 31 They wanted this whole experiment to be over.

Speaker 11 They both proposed undoing the trade.

Speaker 39 The problem

Speaker 23 was that Fritz and Susan completely disagreed.

Speaker 8 And ultimately,

Speaker 8 you know, I think they both realized, but the Peterson, Fritz and Susan, especially, how unhappy they are, if you will, back with their other original spouses and the same the other way.

Speaker 8 But the part of it that was the interesting story was this ongoing sense, and again, vis-a-vis via Fritz Peterson, that Kekic felt cheated.

Speaker 11 It's incredible, man.

Speaker 35 This is incredible.

Speaker 1 The idea that it starts with like the physical lust, the testosterone, the pheromones of Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson together. And they're late because they were fing before that diner meeting.

Speaker 1 And now

Speaker 1 they are realizing, oh, no, it's the other couple that is way more into this.

Speaker 8 There's a sense from Marilyn of like, what have I done? Like, what about, what about my thing? But from the, from the, the, the, the kicketch side, just a real sense of like,

Speaker 8 what about me? I lost. I should, I should, I deserve more.
And there's a, there's a jealousy, a weird jealousy, not necessarily about the wife, but rather, you beat me.

Speaker 1 It does feel like this is a turning point for Mike Kekic,

Speaker 1 that from there, the arc of his story does proceed to get gloomier.

Speaker 8 Well, yeah, I mean, the Yankees make a very quick and easy choice, which is Peterson versus Kekic, and

Speaker 8 they trade him off to Cleveland, which as bad as the Yankees were, Cleveland was the bottom of the barrel.

Speaker 32 And just to be clear, the decision to trade Mike was quick and easy simply because Fritz was the better pitcher, as we said.

Speaker 16 Fritz was a former 20-game winner, actually, and he still holds the record for the lowest ERA in the history of the old Yankee Stadium at 2.52.

Speaker 34 Mike, by the time the Yankees shipped him off to Cleveland, had an ERA of 9.2.

Speaker 31 But in every other sense, the entire transaction year, the dissolution of a best friendship, the dissolution of multiple relationships, of multiple families on multiple levels, all of that was shattering.

Speaker 14 It was heartbreakingly difficult.

Speaker 12 And as crazy as all of it obviously was, PR guy Marty Appel

Speaker 27 was shocked.

Speaker 42 I never saw that coming.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 42 there was a sadness about it because

Speaker 42 they they were not approachable now as a foursome.

Speaker 42 You had to sort of be careful what you said and did with the four of them.

Speaker 42 The trade was inevitable because of the tension in the clubhouse. Nobody knew what to say to anybody.

Speaker 42 The sadness, which wasn't something that made its way into the newspaper, was that there were children involved here.

Speaker 8 But it does begin a long downward spiral,

Speaker 8 I guess, for Kekic that I guess ends with him asking us to buy him a speedboat.

Speaker 11 So I got to explain the speedboat thing because Dave Mandel never talked to Mike Kekic.

Speaker 19 Mike Kekic had a trade proposal, it turns out, of his own.

Speaker 11 He would talk to Hollywood Dave Mandel if Dave Mandel bought him a speedboat.

Speaker 17 Dave Mandel, regrettably, did not buy Mike a speedboat.

Speaker 2 And he never talked to him.

Speaker 30 And neither did I, despite many, many attempts to do so.

Speaker 11 What we know instead is that Mike once called this point in his career a black hole.

Speaker 13 This was the time that he got traded to Cleveland.

Speaker 10 And he then went on to play in Japan and then Mexico.

Speaker 11 He was out of the major leagues.

Speaker 7 And CBS News actually found him in Mexico in the spring of 1981 in the only clip anywhere we could find of Mike speaking.

Speaker 45 Lately, I've been pitching fairly miserably.

Speaker 27 In the last two games, I got pounded pretty severely.

Speaker 45 Kekic gave up eight hits this night.

Speaker 19 At last check, Mike Kekic wound up in real estate.

Speaker 11 He was working and had settled down in New Mexico, actually, building what is believed to be a new life totally apart from Marilyn, who had also herself found a new life apart from Mike and everyone else.

Speaker 10 She had found a new spouse and also had no interest in talking to screenwriters like Dave or nosy reporters like me.

Speaker 11 But as for Mike Kekic's friendship with Fritz Peterson, that best friendship at the core of this whole thing, I defer now to something Fritz once said at a dinner with Dave Mandel and Peter Melman, the Seinfeld writer who you had met before, who introduced Dave to this entire story in the first place.

Speaker 18 And Peter remembers it like this.

Speaker 8 I kind of took my cue from Dave because he just He just said stuff about the scandal, you know, like they were talking about what was in the paper that day. So I remember, like,

Speaker 8 even still, I remember saying, kind of sheepishly saying,

Speaker 8 so

Speaker 8 you and Kekic are not, you know, like friends anymore? He goes, no, no, I haven't, I haven't, we haven't been in contact in years.

Speaker 8 You know, he goes, yeah, he goes, their relationship didn't last too long. And I remember thinking like,

Speaker 8 God,

Speaker 8 I mean, like,

Speaker 8 did Kekic think he made the biggest mistake of his life?

Speaker 8 I asked him if he still keeps in touch and he said, no. I said, so you have any idea of what his life is like? And he said, no, none.

Speaker 13 All right.

Speaker 6 So no, none is the sort of statement to me that raises a fundamental question. A fundamental question about the kind of movie that Dave Mandel even wanted the trade to be.

Speaker 18 Because all of this started, let's remember, with an absurdist premise, worthy of Seinfeld or Veep or SNL or curb your enthusiasm.

Speaker 45 You and I ever split up? Let me tell you something. We get a divorce.
50-50, you take whatever 50% you want. I'll take what's left.
No, no arguing, no negativity. Are you kidding me?

Speaker 5 You think we're going to have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? No f ⁇ ing way. I'm taking you for everything you have, mister.
I'm taking your balls and I'm thumb-tacking them to the wall.

Speaker 13 Which is also, urologically speaking, more or less how Dave felt about his own voyage through Hollywood with this screenplay.

Speaker 21 Because there were a series of stops and starts at Fox and Warner Brothers and a series of flings with would-be directors from Jay Roach, who did Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, to Richard Linkletter, who directed Boyhood and Before Sunset.

Speaker 11 And so he had to pitch and defend his vision for this, how much laughter he wanted to be in this, the question of what this movie was supposed to be.

Speaker 8 I guess to me,

Speaker 8 the way I sort of always thought about it was, unlike, say, a show like Seinfeld or Veep or whatever, where we write jokes, we write things, we write setups to create punchlines.

Speaker 8 You know, there were not a lot of punchlines, so to speak. But the story itself, all the things that you and I are sort of sitting here going, oh my God, I can't believe it.

Speaker 8 Even though I was the originator of it, I had to beg Warner Brothers to actually let me write it because. The movie industry sucks, where I just said, I don't care.

Speaker 8 Just give me the worst deal possible. I just want to write it.

Speaker 1 I love that's how much you cared about this.

Speaker 8 And this would have been around, I wrote it right around when my daughter was born. So that would have been like 2008.

Speaker 8 And then having written it, there was this period where Ben Affleck got very interested in it. There was a moment where he was maybe going to star and direct in it.

Speaker 35 And he would have played, if he did play a character,

Speaker 8 which in my mind would have been Kekic.

Speaker 8 He was Kekic.

Speaker 46 Yeah, agreed. It's called The Trade, and it has been in development with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to star in the roles of Peterson and Kekic.

Speaker 46 Oh, there you go.

Speaker 46 But we need a dock. That's what Peter's saying.
That's just a movement. No, I want to know how far along in development this is.

Speaker 46 I guess it's been in development a while, but it hasn't gotten the proper funding.

Speaker 8 And at some point, the fake dream that perhaps Matt would be Damon would have been Peterson, although, again, more wishful thinking perhaps than we never got anywhere in here.

Speaker 8 somewhere i think he was still interested in directing it and at some point or another his brother casey affleck i think took a pass that was another pass your script in 2009 for people who aren't familiar with like again the backrooms of hollywood like the blacklist identifies it as the script of of great note that was that was very nice yes i was very much hoping coming off of Veep,

Speaker 8 that someone would more or less let me do it again, that I had whatever achieved enough

Speaker 8 some sort of success to do and had become more of a director in my own right and whatever.

Speaker 8 And that sort of coincided very much where the movie industry sort of went away and they stopped making movies. So that's kind of where we are at the moment.

Speaker 1 Yeah, had you considered rebooting this as a Marvel movie, perhaps?

Speaker 28 Yeah, that's it. That's what it would be.

Speaker 8 Two Superman and Batman swap lives.

Speaker 7 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But there's, but the idea that you have this passion project, I like to imagine the would-be movie movie poster right because you mentioned damon and affleck i want to dwell for a second here on the wives though marilyn was fascinating marilyn

Speaker 8 was a real ball breaker on the one hand very concerned with appearances very concerned with how like how things looked the sort of the sense of propriety but under it lurking something else someone like ann hathaway seemed like a no-brainer what are you doing what's wrong with you you can't just go around kissing people, particularly not engaged people.

Speaker 1 I suppose that it's worth noting that, like, actresses who are considered at least mentioned, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weiss, Rebecca Hall.

Speaker 8 You know, it's interesting. Susan Kekic, there was a real just like kind of California girl free spirit to her.
And I'm not going to lie, in certain ways, she was perhaps the least...

Speaker 8 fleshed out character because it's funny in a weird way because

Speaker 8 in talking to Fritz Peterson, he was talking about how in love he was with her. It was almost like in his telling, she's the most

Speaker 8 idealized character. So she, I never got to hear a flaw.
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 31 And the reason Fritz never told Dave about Sue's flaws and all the time they spent together and all the time Dave spent researching Fritz's life,

Speaker 35 it brings us finally, finally, to the most stunning part of one of the most batch crazy sagas in sports history,

Speaker 18 which is that Fritz and Sue

Speaker 24 never broke up.

Speaker 18 Seriously, I'm looking at the timeline here.

Speaker 40 Fritz and Sue got married in 1974, the year after the trade got announced.

Speaker 20 And what still blows the mind of the PR guy who organized those dueling pressers, our old pal Marty,

Speaker 20 it's that Fritz and Sue proceeded to stay together for more than 50 fucking

Speaker 23 years.

Speaker 42 That's the wonderful side of the story. That's a true love story.
I mean, who goes 50 years?

Speaker 42 You know, a couple meets in college, falls in love. It's the great American love story.
It still doesn't go 50 years. That's not the way things work.
So it's wonderful that it did for them.

Speaker 42 So it is maybe the greatest of all American love stories.

Speaker 23 And Fritz, in various interviews he gave over the years, could not agree more.

Speaker 23 I mean, just listen to him.

Speaker 47 The kids probably,

Speaker 47 a couple of them probably aren't really happy about it, but you know what? They're in their late 40s now, and

Speaker 47 they're doing fine. They're good kids.
So to that regard, that wasn't a problem either. I mean,

Speaker 47 they probably wish it wouldn't have happened, but I don't know how it could not have happened some way.

Speaker 47 We've just had so much fun, and I thank God for my new wife. We're still partying every night.
Our honeymoon never wore off, and I hope it never does.

Speaker 19 All of which leaves me with just one more question

Speaker 18 for Dave Mandel.

Speaker 1 What is the ending of your movie?

Speaker 1 Such as it was, was what?

Speaker 8 The basic end was ultimately Ketic is traded off to Cleveland and then bounces whatever.

Speaker 8 And then Fritz is traded off. They just, they cast him out

Speaker 8 of his arm injury that year and wasn't quite the same pitcher, which again speaks at the time to the disposable nature of these players and the contracts at that time.

Speaker 8 And the only thing that he had been asked and assured is that he, of course, would never get traded to Cleveland himself. And they trade him to Cleveland as well.

Speaker 8 Kekic is long gone. They're not teammates again, but

Speaker 8 they are there.

Speaker 1 There's a cosmic connection.

Speaker 7 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 8 Just the curse of Cleveland. And it's sort of a sense of the one couple is together, is happy.
The other couple has tried a couple of times, but it hasn't quite worked, whatever.

Speaker 8 And I think

Speaker 8 I'm trying to remember, God, it's been so long. And it does end with a little bit of a joke, which was Kekic at that point has a new young wife, and Fritz makes a trade joke with him.

Speaker 8 And that's sort of the, that was sort of the end, which was my, a little bit of an attempt at sort of a, uh,

Speaker 8 uh, if you will, sort of Billy Wilder, nobody's perfect, something like it hot, last line, want to trade or something like that.

Speaker 7 But right, right, right.

Speaker 8 That's, that was my end.

Speaker 8 But, but ultimately, like I said, trying to make some sense of this, that somehow in this crazy story, there was a real love story, although perhaps we even need to question that.

Speaker 8 I guess that's, that's my end.

Speaker 1 So what I have found out at the end of this conversation is that we need to crowdfund a speedboat for Mike Kackic.

Speaker 11 All right, so the episode is not over yet.

Speaker 35 And it's not over yet because

Speaker 12 about two weeks ago, while finishing production on this thing that we'd been working on for months now, that's when it first started.

Speaker 29 I got an alert on my phone that made me need to sit down.

Speaker 10 The headline from the Associated Press

Speaker 30 read: Fritz Peterson, Yankees pitcher who traded wives with teammate Mike Kekic,

Speaker 1 dies at age 81.

Speaker 29 It turns out that Fritz had been fighting lung cancer.

Speaker 34 I didn't know about this,

Speaker 30 in part because I never got to talk to Fritz Peterson myself.

Speaker 11 In 2018, Fritz's family had posted on Facebook that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which is why talking to Dave Mandel in the first place

Speaker 11 was so important to this episode.

Speaker 30 Dave had talked to Fritz extensively even before that, and Dave was more obsessed with this story, with Fritz's story, than even I was.

Speaker 35 But neither of us knew the detail that the AP obituary revealed in the second paragraph of that story, after the one about the trade, which was again erroneously called, you know, a wife swap.

Speaker 17 What we didn't know is that Fritz had actually died at his home in Minnesota back in October.

Speaker 29 of 2023, according to county records.

Speaker 23 Which means that Fritz's death had been kept secret for, yeah, about half a year.

Speaker 11 And in fact, the only reason why it leaked out at all is because the athletic department at Northern Illinois University, where Fritz went to college, had accidentally spread the news.

Speaker 2 And then the AP checked the county records, and then people realized that Fritz had been gone long before they realized it.

Speaker 23 And all of it explains why reporting this story over the last six months had been so difficult and so strange.

Speaker 11 I presume that Sue wouldn't want to talk in public about any of this stuff,

Speaker 23 but now realizing that she had lost her husband of 50 years,

Speaker 40 I mean, of course she wouldn't.

Speaker 11 And the same goes for all the four kids involved who we've mentioned here and who I didn't get to talk to.

Speaker 11 And only in retrospect do I now realize what this was.

Speaker 34 It was an overdue sense of privacy for an athlete whose most intimate decisions became willfully known to so many strangers all across America, throughout time.

Speaker 36 And so it did feel appropriate that the real last scene in this real-life love story just wasn't for the rest of us to see.

Speaker 44 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production,

Speaker 28 and I'll talk to you next time.