Behind the Scenes of the Yankee Wife-Swap Scandal (PTFO Vault)

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Speaker 10 Okay, so hello.

Speaker 10 It is me, Pablo, entering, invading even your ears, because I have done something I have not done before, which is take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them.

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Speaker 10 And this, this episode today, is a hand-picked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy.

Speaker 10 Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 11 No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor.

Speaker 10 Right after this ad.

Speaker 10 Dave Mandel, I should say that I have been on a bit of an odyssey that has led me to you. Uh-oh.
Well, uh-oh, in a couple of senses that I want to explore and excavate with you.

Speaker 10 But how should I introduce you? Because there's a lot to introduce, I suppose.

Speaker 12 I don't know. You know, sometimes I feel like

Speaker 12 you can kind of just go in chronological order, or you can just kind of go

Speaker 12 what my, I guess, tombstone will say, which is the guy that wrote the Bizarro Jerry. Yeah, that's sort of, I I think, how I'm going to, that's sort of as good as it's going to get vis-a-vis death.

Speaker 13 So, yeah.

Speaker 10 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 10 And Dave Mandel, longtime Seinfeld writer, was in fact responsible.

Speaker 14 So he's Bizarro Jerry.

Speaker 2 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 10 Shouldn't he say badby?

Speaker 14 Isn't that the opposite of goodbye?

Speaker 15 No, it's still goodbye.

Speaker 6 Does he live underwater? No.

Speaker 10 Is he black?

Speaker 14 Look, just forget the whole thing, all right?

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 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

Speaker 10 occurred,

Speaker 10 as Matt Damon is well aware. A couple of quick questions about you getting

Speaker 10 doing a production deal with Ben Afflack, kind of going back in business again.

Speaker 10 True or false, are you going to make a movie together where you play wife-swapping Yankees?

Speaker 10 There is a

Speaker 10 true story, actually.

Speaker 10 But I haven't seen a script for that one yet.

Speaker 10 But I am here to tell you that this script does exist.

Speaker 10 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.
Dave Mandel is the guy who spent years researching this.

Speaker 10 And that's the part I really cared about. Because yes, as Matt Damon was alluding to just then to CBS, the story of the Yankee wife swap is a true

Speaker 10 story.

Speaker 10 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 10 And Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekic in the 1970s

Speaker 10 actually decided

Speaker 10 to switch wives.

Speaker 10 And so how is it, David Mandel, that you got involved with the story of the Yankee wife swap?

Speaker 12 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 12 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 12 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 12 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 12 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.
I was born in 1970.

Speaker 12 So it happened obviously when I was a little kid. I'd never heard the story.
Dave grew up in Manhattan, and I think he grew up on scandal.

Speaker 10 And,

Speaker 12 you know, so anything I could tell him story-wise that was somewhat scandalous or lurid, especially lurid, he just loved it. So

Speaker 12 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 12 and 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 12 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 12 And I kind of walked out of that just going, holy crap, that seems like it would be a great movie.

Speaker 12 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.

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Speaker 12 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 12 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 12 So there were definitely

Speaker 12 one of them seemed more, if you will, the straighter guy, and one was more a little bit the devil, if you will.

Speaker 10 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 10 And at every turn, we've been fact-checking this.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 Mike was visibly more confident, more experienced, more aggressive in that realm.

Speaker 10 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 10 Because in the 70s, apparently, sports writers and athletes would actually socialize and hang out.

Speaker 10 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 16 We were all drinking beer and having good time. 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 16 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 10 Because again, Mike was more aggressive, but Fritz was a good teammate.

Speaker 16 And I said, hey, why don't you, Marilyn, why don't you go back to the window? At the time your wife is Marilyn. Yes.
Ride with Mike to the diner in Fort Lee where we had met before we came.

Speaker 16 And I said, Susan will go with me and we'll just meet you back there.

Speaker 12 There was this mutual decision, very

Speaker 12 both fake and yet organic, of why don't I drive your wife and why don't you drive my wife?

Speaker 12 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 12 And Kekic and Marilyn disappear for two hours.

Speaker 10 And then two hours later,

Speaker 10 fill in the blanks, Mike Kekic emerges with

Speaker 10 Marilyn, Fritz's wife.

Speaker 16 We just had a very good time,

Speaker 16 actually, innocently. Right.

Speaker 16 And the next day we were back at the ballpark.

Speaker 16 This was a Friday. And we said, you know, that was really fun.
Let's do it again.

Speaker 12 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. Then it becomes sort of more organized.

Speaker 12 Then they try and put an end to it because rumors are getting out. And then ultimately,

Speaker 12 they just are like, it doesn't matter. I love her.
I want to be with her.

Speaker 12 I love him. I want to be with him.
Vice versa.

Speaker 10 And so I do need to clarify here that these two couples, these two Yankee couples, weren't just swingers.

Speaker 10 I mean, look, it wasn't just the 70s. That's not entirely what the story is about here.

Speaker 10 By Fritz's own admission, the physical electricity between his wife Marilyn and his best friend Mike had been undeniable by this point.

Speaker 10 And Fritz Peterson, by the way, was clearly falling for Sue Kekic

Speaker 10 as well.

Speaker 10 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 10 And no, they they weren't swapping wives. That's, I think, still the biggest misconception about the whole deal here.
The Petersons and the Kekitches were actually swapping husbands.

Speaker 10 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 10 There was just a matter of, you know,

Speaker 10 a pitching change.

Speaker 18 My name is Rick Dempsey.

Speaker 18 My position, I'm a catcher. I joined the Yankees as a catcher in 1972

Speaker 18 through 76.

Speaker 10 And Rick's job, in the most literal sense, was to know what Fritz and Mike were going to throw at him.

Speaker 18 I get it occasionally. Every couple of years, somebody will say, oh, weren't you there when Mike Hackidge and Fritz Peterson were there? And I go, yeah, I was there

Speaker 18 when it all happened.

Speaker 18 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 10 How did you learn that the swap was happening?

Speaker 18 Well, they called a meeting in the clubhouse to talk about it, you know.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 18 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 18 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 18 That's basically it. Other than that, I think by that time, the owner, George Steinbroter, had asked everybody to just kind of shy away from it.

Speaker 10 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 10 and one with Fritz Peterson at 4 p.m.

Speaker 10 A truly unprecedented doubleheader for the PR staffer in charge.

Speaker 20 I'm Marty Appell,

Speaker 20 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 20 So

Speaker 20 now I'm reduced to kind of doing Zoom interviews on the subject of the Yankees.

Speaker 10 But you should probably know that Marty was 24 years old on the day in question.

Speaker 20 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 20 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 20 Some phone calls came through, but it was the era before

Speaker 20 even People magazine, let alone Extra and the Inside Edition and all of that. There was like a five-day story in the New York tabloids.
Front page, there had been an outing the previous summer on

Speaker 20 an off day where we had all gone out on a a yacht for a cruise out in New York Harbor and the Petersons and the Kekages were in the photograph together.

Speaker 20 So that became sort of aha, we got a photo of them.

Speaker 12 And then eventually almost a week later, as memory serves, Johnny Carson makes his first joke about it.

Speaker 21 You know, the sports writers have been saying a long time they had to do something to make baseball more interesting.

Speaker 21 And this is really it.

Speaker 21 I understand Fritz is getting Mike's wife, plus a...

Speaker 21 a child to be named later.

Speaker 10 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 10 he's the guy who seemed to be like, hey,

Speaker 10 look, this isn't that weird, right? Like, this doesn't have to be that weird. He wanted to sort of

Speaker 10 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 10 Otherwise, you know, that was all going to stay the same.

Speaker 11 No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor.

Speaker 11 Now, when a Yankee gets traded away, his wife stays with the team.

Speaker 21 You know, it's going to be a strange year in baseball. Ump says play ball, and everybody throws their keys into the ballpark.

Speaker 10 So, no, in other words, Fritz's plea for understanding, his big plea to respect his bond with Susan, as this mature decision.

Speaker 10 It failed to work on anyone. It failed to work on Bob Hope.
It failed to work on Johnny Carson because of course.

Speaker 10 But the narrative around the trade did start changing pretty soon on account of a crucial plot twist, as our guy Marty recalls.

Speaker 20 What happened in the immediate days after was that

Speaker 20 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 20 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 20 And that's when it became apparent that one of them was going to have to get traded.

Speaker 10 Within a week, it was obvious that Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson both had buyers' remorse, essentially. This was just within within days of those dual press conferences and spring training.

Speaker 10 They wanted this whole experiment to be over. They both proposed undoing the trade.

Speaker 10 The problem

Speaker 10 was that Fritz and Susan completely disagreed.

Speaker 12 And ultimately,

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 original spouses and the same the other way.

Speaker 12 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 10 It's incredible, man. This is incredible.
The idea that it starts with like the physical lust, the testosterone, the pheromones of Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson together.

Speaker 10 And they're late because they were fing before that diner meeting. And now they are realizing, oh no, it's the other couple that is way more into this.

Speaker 12 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 kick itch side, just a real sense of like,

Speaker 12 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.

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Speaker 10 It does feel like this is a turning point for Mike Kekic,

Speaker 10 that from there, the arc of his story does proceed to get gloomier.

Speaker 12 Well, yeah, I mean, the Yankees make a very quick and easy choice, which is Peterson versus Kekic, and they trade him, they trade him off to Cleveland, which as bad as the Yankees were, Cleveland was the bottom of the barrel.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 Mike, by the time the Yankees shipped him off to Cleveland, had an ERA of 9.2.

Speaker 10 But in every other sense, the entire transaction here, the dissolution of a best friendship, the dissolution of multiple relationships, of multiple families on multiple levels.

Speaker 10 All of that was shattering. It was, it was heartbreakingly difficult.
And as crazy as all of it obviously was, PR guy Marty Appell

Speaker 10 was shocked.

Speaker 20 I never saw that coming.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 20 there was a sadness about it because

Speaker 20 They were not approachable now as a foursome.

Speaker 20 You had to sort of be careful what you said and did with the four of them.

Speaker 20 The trade was inevitable because of the tension in the clubhouse. Nobody knew what to say to anybody.

Speaker 20 The sadness, which wasn't something that made its way into the newspaper, was that there were children involved here.

Speaker 12 But it does begin a long downward spiral,

Speaker 12 I guess, for

Speaker 12 Kekic that I guess ends with him asking us to buy him a speedboat.

Speaker 10 So I got to explain the speedboat thing because Dave Mandel never talked to Mike Kekic. Mike Kekic had a trade proposal, it turns out, of his own.

Speaker 10 He would talk to Hollywood Dave Mandel if Dave Mandel bought him a speedboat.

Speaker 10 Dave Mandel, regrettably, did not buy Mike a speedboat. And he never talked to him, and neither did I, despite many, many attempts to do so.

Speaker 10 What we know instead is that Mike once called this point in his career a black hole. This was the time that he got traded to Cleveland.
And he then went on to play in Japan and then Mexico.

Speaker 10 He was out of the major leagues. 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 17 Lately, I've been pitching fairly miserably.

Speaker 17 In the last two games, I got pounded pretty severely.

Speaker 17 Kekic gave up eight hits this night.

Speaker 10 At last check, Mike Kekic wound up in real estate.

Speaker 10 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 10 But as for Mike Kekic's friendship with Fritz Peterson, that best friendship at the core of this whole thing.

Speaker 10 I defer now to something 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 10 And Peter remembers it like this:

Speaker 12 I kind of took my cue from Dave because

Speaker 12 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 12 even still, I remember saying, kind of sheepishly, saying,

Speaker 12 so

Speaker 12 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 12 You know, he goes, yeah, he goes, their relationship didn't last too long. And I remember thinking, like,

Speaker 12 God, I mean, like,

Speaker 12 did Kekic think he made the biggest mistake of his life?

Speaker 12 I asked him if he still keeps in touch and he said, no. I said, so you have any idea of what his his life is like? And he said, no, none.

Speaker 10 All right. 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 10 Because all of this started, let's remember, with an absurdist premise, worthy of Seinfeld or Veep or SNL or curb your enthusiasm.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 15 Are you kidding me?

Speaker 10 You think we're going to have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? No fing 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 10 Which is also, urologically speaking, more or less how Dave felt about his own voyage through Hollywood with this screenplay.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 12 I guess to me,

Speaker 12 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 12 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 12 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 12 Just give me the worst deal possible. I just want to write it.

Speaker 10 I love

Speaker 10 that that's how much you cared about this.

Speaker 12 And this would have been around, I wrote it right around when my daughter was born.

Speaker 12 So that would have been like 2008 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 and he would have played if he did play a character do you know which in my mind would have been kekic

Speaker 22 he was he was kekic 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 22 well there you go

Speaker 22 But we need a dock. That's what Peter's saying.
That's just a move. No, I want to know how far along in development this is.

Speaker 22 I guess it's been in development a while, but it hasn't gotten the proper funding.

Speaker 12 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 12 Somewhere, I think he was still interested in directing it.

Speaker 12 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 back rooms of hollywood like the blacklist identifies it as this script of of great note that was that was very nice yes i i was very much hoping coming off of veep

Speaker 12 that someone would more or less let me do it again that i had

Speaker 12 whatever achieved enough right some sort of success to do and had become more of a director in my own right and whatever And that sort of coincided very much where the movie industry sort of went away and they stopped making movies.

Speaker 13 So that's kind of where we are at the moment.

Speaker 10 Yeah, had you considered rebooting this as a Marvel movie, perhaps? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 12 Two Superman and Batman swap wives.

Speaker 10 Exactly. Yeah.
But there's, but the idea that you have this passion project. I like to imagine the would-be movie poster, right? Because you mentioned Damon and Affleck.

Speaker 10 I want to dwell for a second here on the wives, though.

Speaker 12 Marilyn was fascinating. Marilyn was a real ball breaker on the one hand, very concerned with appearances, very concerned with how things looked.

Speaker 12 The sort of the sense of propriety, but under it lurking something else. Someone like Anne Hathaway seemed like a no-brainer.
What are you doing? What's wrong with you?

Speaker 12 You can't just go around kissing people, particularly not engaged people. I did.
You want to kiss again?

Speaker 10 I suppose that it's worth noting that like actresses who are considered, at least, mentioned, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weiss, Rebecca Hall.

Speaker 12 You know, it's interesting. Susan Kekic, there was a real just like kind of California girl free spirit to her.

Speaker 12 And I'm not going to lie, in certain ways, she was perhaps the least fleshed out character because it's funny, in a weird way, because

Speaker 12 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 12 idealized character. So she,

Speaker 12 I never got to hear a flaw. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 10 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 10 It brings us finally, finally. to the most stunning part of one of the most bad crazy sagas in sports history,

Speaker 10 which is that Fritz and Sue

Speaker 10 never broke up.

Speaker 10 Seriously, I'm looking at the timeline here. Fritz and Sue got married in 1974, the year after the trade got announced.

Speaker 10 And what still blows the mind of the PR guy who organized those dueling pressers, our old pal Marty,

Speaker 10 it's that Fritz and Sue proceeded to stay together. for more than 50 fing

Speaker 10 years.

Speaker 20 That's the wonderful wonderful side of the story. That's a true love story.
I mean, who goes 50 years?

Speaker 20 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 20 So it is maybe the greatest of all American love stories.

Speaker 10 And Fritz, in various interviews he gave over the years, could not agree more.

Speaker 10 I mean, just listen to him.

Speaker 14 The kids probably,

Speaker 23 a couple of them probably aren't real happy about it, but you know what? They're in their late 40s now, and

Speaker 23 they're doing fine. They're good kids.
So to that regard, that wasn't a problem either. I mean,

Speaker 23 they probably wish it wouldn't have happened, but I don't know how it could not have happened some way.

Speaker 23 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 10 All of which leaves me with just one more question for Dave Mandel.

Speaker 10 What is the ending of your movie,

Speaker 10 such as it was, was what?

Speaker 12 The basic end was ultimately Kekic is traded off to Cleveland and then bounces whatever.

Speaker 12 And then

Speaker 12 Fritz is traded off. They just cast him like a yearly arm injury that year and wasn't quite the same pitcher, which again

Speaker 12 speaks at the time to the disposable nature of these players and the contracts at that time.

Speaker 12 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 12 Ketich is long gone. They're not teammates again, but

Speaker 12 they are there.

Speaker 10 There's a cosmic connection. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 12 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 12 And I think

Speaker 12 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 12 And that's sort of the, that was sort of the end, which was my, a little bit of an attempt at sort sort of a,

Speaker 12 if you will, sort of Billy Wilder, nobody's perfect, some like it hot last line, want to trade or something like that.

Speaker 10 But right, right, right.

Speaker 12 But that's that was my end. 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.

Speaker 12 Although perhaps we even need to question that. I guess that's that's my end.

Speaker 10 So, what I have found out at the end of this conversation is that we need to crowdfund a speedboat for Mike Kackage.

Speaker 10 All right, so the episode is not over yet. And it's not over yet because

Speaker 10 About two weeks ago, while finishing production on this thing that we've been working on for months now, that's when it first started, I got an alert on my phone that made me need to sit down.

Speaker 10 The headline from the Associated Press

Speaker 10 read, Fritz Peterson, Yankees pitcher who traded wives with teammate Mike Kekic,

Speaker 10 dies at age 81.

Speaker 10 It turns out that Fritz had been fighting lung cancer. I didn't know about this,

Speaker 10 in part because I never got to talk to Fritz Fritz Peterson myself.

Speaker 10 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 10 was so important to this episode.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 What we didn't know was that Fritz had actually died at his home in Minnesota back in October of 2023, according to county records.

Speaker 10 Which means that Fritz's death had been kept secret for, yeah, about half a year.

Speaker 10 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 10 And then the AP checked the county records, and then people realized that Fritz had been gone long before they realized it.

Speaker 10 And all of it explains why reporting this story over the last six months had

Speaker 10 been so difficult and so strange.

Speaker 10 I presumed that Sue wouldn't want to talk in public about any of this stuff.

Speaker 10 But now realizing that she had lost her husband of 50 years,

Speaker 10 I mean, of course she wouldn't. 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 10 And only in retrospect do I now realize what this was.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark Media production.

Speaker 10 And I'll talk to you next time.