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

Long before the viral Coldplay concert, there was another — and even wilder — affair caught on camera. Two pitchers for the Yankees agreed to the wildest trade in sports history: They switched wives. And children. And furniture. And pets. David Mandel laments his big-screen adaptation that never was... even though the ultimate passion project could have starred Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. (This episode originally aired April 30, 2024.) • Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and invites https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:56Pablo Torre?

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• 1:40Pablo Torre?

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• 1:58Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so hello, 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. And so I am. On Substack, my newsletter, at www.pablo.show, we'll put a link in the show notes of this episode, I have turned on paid subscriptions. And if you didn't know I have a Substack, guess what? It's free. And that's still there for you, and it's worth it. But

• 2:43Pablo Torre?

  the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool, personalized benefits to come. We will make it worth your while. We are figuring out, here at PTFO, our post-draft kings' future. And, you know, more good news on that front, I hope, to come. But in the meantime, Pablo.show is where you sign up, click the link in the show notes, help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front. And this, this episode today, is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:28Speaker 03

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

• 3:36Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:43Pablo Torre?

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

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Uh-oh.

• 3:49Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  I don't know. You know, sometimes I feel like, 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." Yeah, that's sort of, I think, how I'm gonna, that's sort of as good as it's gonna get, vis-à-vis death. So, yeah.

• 4:20Pablo Torre?

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

• 4:33Speaker 05

  So he's Bizarro Jerry?

• 4:36Speaker 06

  Bizarro Jerry?

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, like Bizarro Superman. Superman's the exact opposite. Who lives in the backwards Bizarro world. Up is down, down is up. He says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  Shouldn't he say bad-bye? Isn't that the opposite of goodbye?

• 4:56Speaker 05

  No, it's still goodbye.

• 5:00Speaker 06

  Does he live underwater?

• 5:01Speaker 05

  No.

• 5:02Speaker 06

  Is he black?

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Look, just forget the whole thing, alright?

• 5:05Pablo Torre?

  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 Night Live, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Veep, all of which he did. 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. 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, as Matt Damon is well aware.

• 5:45Speaker 07

  A couple of quick questions about you getting, doing a production deal with Ben Affleck, kind of going back in business again.

• 5:52Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 5:54Speaker 07

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

• 6:00Pablo Torre?

  There is a, there is a, it's a true story, actually. But I haven't seen a script for that one yet. But I'm here to tell you that this script does exist. 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. 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 story. It is the real life tale of two best friends, two real life starting pitchers for the New York Yankees,

• 6:42Pablo Torre?

  my favorite team, named Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekic. And Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekic in the 1970s actually decided to switch wives. And so how is it, David Mandel, that you got involved with the story of the Yankee wife swap?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  It's funny, it actually goes back to Seinfeld, which is Peter Melman, who was one of the longtime Seinfeld writers. He and I wrote episodes together. We wrote the backwards episode of Seinfeld. We wrote that, we co-wrote that together and, you know, friends, whatever, all those good things.

• 7:21Speaker 08

  I am Peter Melman, longtime sports fan and occasional writer.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  And I used to hang out in his office and he had this wonderful book on his coffee table in his office. 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. 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, so it happened, obviously, when I was a little kid. I'd never heard the story.

• 8:04Speaker 08

  Dave grew up in Manhattan and I think he grew up on Scandal.

• 8:11Speaker 08

  And, you know, so anything I could tell him story wise that was somewhat scandalous or lurid, especially lurid, he just loved it. So I, 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. And nobody was paying attention to them. The announcers were barely involved in the game and all of a sudden it comes out that

• 8:48Speaker 08

  two pitchers on the team, two lefties, have swapped families, not just wives, they swapped their entire families.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  And I just go, what is this? And he goes, no, no, no, it's a real story. And I kind of walked out of that just going, holy crap, that seems like it would be a great movie. I mean, it's, I mean, I know it sounds silly, but it's as simple as, boy, that sounds like a great movie.

• 9:30Pablo Torre?

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• 10:03Speaker 00

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• 10:26Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  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. Fritz Peterson was the more straight-laced of the two. Kekic was a wilder character. There was a period of time where he was just always walking around with a tennis racket. He was kooky. So there were definitely, one of them seemed more, if you will, the straighter guy, and one was more a little bit the devil, if you will.

• 11:40Pablo Torre?

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

• 12:22Pablo Torre?

  Mike was visibly more confident, more experienced, more aggressive in that realm. And very late one evening in July 1972, both the Petersons and the Kekiches found themselves at a house party thrown by a sports writer for the New York Post. Because in the 70s, apparently, sports writers and athletes would actually socialize and hang out. And this is what Fritz Peterson would tell a radio show many years later about what happened that fateful night at around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.

• 12:51Speaker 09

  We were all drinking beer and having-

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Good time.

• 12:54Speaker 09

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

• 13:13Pablo Torre?

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

• 13:18Speaker 09

  And I said, "Hey, why don't you, Marilyn, why don't you go back to Mike?"

• 13:22Speaker 04

  At the time, your wife is Marilyn.

• 13:23Speaker 09

  Yes, I'd with Mike to the diner in Fort Lee where we had met-

• 13:28Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 09

  -before we came. And I said, "Susan will go with me and we'll just meet you back there."

• 13:36Speaker 04

  There was this mutual decision, very, both fake and yet organic, of why don't I drive your wife and why don't you drive my wife? 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. And Kekich and Marilyn disappear for two hours.

• 14:05Pablo Torre?

  And then, two hours later, fill in the blanks, Mike Kekich emerges with Marilyn, Fritz's wife.

• 14:15Speaker 09

  We just had a very good time, you know, actually innocently.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:20Speaker 09

  And the next day, we were back at the ballpark. This was a Friday and we said, you know, "That was really fun. Let's do it again."

• 14:26Speaker 04

  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. Then they try and put an end to it because rumors are getting out. And then ultimately, they just are like, "It doesn't matter. I love her. I want to be with her. I love him. I want to be with him," vice versa.

• 14:51Pablo Torre?

  And so I do need to clarify here that these two couples, these two Yankee couples, weren't just swingers. I mean, look, it wasn't just the 70s. That's not entirely what this 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. And Fritz Peterson, by the way, was clearly falling for Sue Kekic as well. 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.

• 15:35Pablo Torre?

  And no, they weren't swapping wives. That's, I think, still the biggest misconception about the whole deal here. The Petersons and the Kekic's were actually swapping husbands. Everything else in their house holds, according to the trade, their children, their pets, their furniture, their houses would remain as it was with Marilyn and Sue. It was just a matter of, you know, a pitching change.

• 16:05Speaker 10

  My name is Rick Dempsey. My position, I'm a catcher. I joined the Yankees as a catcher in 1972 through 76.

• 16:16Pablo Torre?

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

• 16:22Speaker 10

  I get it occasionally. Every couple of years, somebody will say, "Oh, weren't you there when Mike Kekic and Fritz Peterson were there?" And I go, "Yeah, I was there." When it all happened, it was probably the biggest news in all of baseball at that time that people would trade everything, even the dogs and the cats.

• 16:41Pablo Torre?

  How did you learn that the swap was happening?

• 16:44Speaker 10

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

• 16:52Speaker 10

  From vaguely what I remember, 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? 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. That's basically it. Other than that, I think by that time, the owner, George Steinbrenner, had asked everybody to just kind of shy away from it.

• 17:24Pablo Torre?

  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. and one with Fritz Peterson at 4 p.m., a truly unprecedented doubleheader for the P R staffer in charge.

• 17:48Speaker 11

  I'm Marty Appel, 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. So now I'm reduced to kind of doing Zoom interviews on the subject of the Yankees.

• 18:11Pablo Torre?

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

• 18:18Speaker 11

  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. 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. Some phone calls came through, but it was the era before, before 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 on a, on an off day where we had all gone out on a yacht for a cruise out in New York Harbor.

• 19:02Speaker 11

  And the Petersons and the Kekkages were in the photograph together. So that became sort of, aha, we got a photo of them.

• 19:11Speaker 04

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

• 19:18Speaker 12

  You know, the sports writers have been saying a long time, they had to do something to make baseball more interesting. And this is really it. I understand Fritz is getting Mike's wife, plus a, a child to be named later.

• 19:31Pablo Torre?

  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, he's the guy who seemed to be like, hey, um, look, this isn't that weird, right? Like, this doesn't have to be that weird. He wanted to sort of, um, 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, otherwise, you know, that was all gonna stay the same.

• 20:03Speaker 12

  No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor. Now when a Yankee gets traded away, his wife stays with the team. You know, it's gonna be a strange year in baseball. Ump says, play ball, and everybody throws their keys into the ballpark.

• 20:20Pablo Torre?

  So, no, in other words. Fritz's plea for understanding, his big plea to respect his bond with Susan as this mature decision, it failed to work on anyone. It failed to work on Bob Hope, it failed to work on Johnny Carson, because of course, but the narrative around the trade did start changing pretty soon, on account of a crucial plot twist, as our guy Marty recalls.

• 20:54Speaker 11

  What happened in the immediate days after was that...

• 20:59Speaker 11

  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. Let's put things back the way they were, but it was too late. You couldn't put it back the way they were. So it became bitter and terrible feelings. And that's when it became apparent that one of them was gonna have to get traded.

• 21:28Pablo Torre?

  Within a week, it was obvious that Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson both had buyer's remorse, essentially. This was just within days of those dual press conferences in spring training. They wanted this whole experiment to be over. They both proposed undoing the trade. The problem was that Fritz and Susan completely disagreed.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  And ultimately, 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. 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.

• 22:20Pablo Torre?

  It's incredible, man. This is incredible, the idea that it starts with like the, the physical lust, the testosterone, the pheromones of Mike Kekic and Marilyn Peterson together. And they're late because they were [BLEEP] before that diner meeting. And now they are realizing, oh no, it's the other couple that is way more into this.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  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 Kekic side, just a real sense of like, 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.

• 23:16Speaker 13

  Hey, I'm Max Brown. You know The Athletic is home to the world's best sports journalism, but this fall, just in time for football season, we're launching something unlike anything we've ever done. We're building a daily show streaming live on YouTube. Me, Kofi Yoboah, Charles McDonald, and The Athletic's own Zach Harper and Daniel Popper. We'll be hosting live watch-alongs of the biggest games with award-winning analysis and behind-the-scenes insights from athletic insiders. On off days, we'll go deeper into the hard-hitting stories you can't get enough of. And we want you, the smartest fans in sports, to be part of it. Come drop questions in the chat and we'll bring the answers straight from the source. The Athletic Live, presented by Google Gemini. Follow us on YouTube and we'll see you in the chat.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 25:08Pablo Torre?

  It does feel like this is a turning point for Mike Kekic. That from there, um, the arc of his story does proceed to get gloomier.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:36Pablo Torre?

  And just to be clear, the decision to trade Mike was quick and easy, simply because Fritz was the better pitcher, as we said. 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. Mike, by the time the Yankees shipped him off to Cleveland, had an ERA of 9.2. 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, all of that was shattering. It was, it was heartbreakingly difficult. And as crazy as all of it obviously was, PR guy Marty Appel was shocked.

• 26:22Speaker 11

  I never saw that coming. And, um, there was a sadness about it because they were not approachable now as a foursome. You had to sort of be careful what you said and did with the four of them. The trade was inevitable because of the tension in the clubhouse. Nobody knew what to say to anybody. The sadness, which wasn't something that made its way into the newspaper, was that there were children involved here.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  But it does begin a long downward spiral, uh, I guess for, uh, Kekic, that I guess ends with him asking us to buy him a speedboat.

• 27:06Pablo Torre?

  So I gotta explain the speedboat thing because Dave Mandell never talked to Mike Kekic. Mike Kekic had a trade proposal, it turns out, of his own. He would talk to Hollywood Dave Mandell if Dave Mandell bought him a speedboat.

• 27:22Pablo Torre?

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

• 27:54Speaker 14

  Lately, I've been pitching fairly miserably.

• 27:59Speaker 14

  And in the last two games, I got pounded pretty severely.

• 28:03Pablo Torre?

  Kekic gave up eight hits this night. At last check, Mike Kekic wound up in real estate. 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. She had found a new spouse and also had no interest in talking to screenwriters like Dave or nosy reporters like me. 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 Mandell and Peter Melman, the Seinfeld writer who you had met before, who introduced Dave to this entire story in the first place.

• 28:48Pablo Torre?

  And Peter remembers it like this.

• 28:50Speaker 08

  I kind of took my cue from Dave because he just, he just said stuff about the scandal, you know, like, like they were talking about what was in the paper that day. So I remember, like, even still, I remember saying, kind of sheepishly saying, "So 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." You know, he goes, yeah, he goes, "Their relationship didn't last too long." And I remember thinking, like, God, I mean, like...

• 29:28Speaker 08

  Did Kekic think he made the biggest mistake of his life? 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.

• 29:41Pablo Torre?

  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 Mandell even wanted The Trade to be. Because all of this started, let's remember, with an absurdist premise worthy of Seinfeld or Veep or SNL or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

• 30:03Speaker 15

  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.

• 30:12Speaker 16

  What are you kidding me? You think we're gonna have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? No way. I'm taking you for everything you have, mister. I'm taking your balls and I'm thumbtacking them to the wall.

• 30:24Pablo Torre?

  Which is also, you're logically speaking, more or less how Dave felt about his own voyage through Hollywood with this screenplay. 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. 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.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  I guess to me, 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, 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. 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. Just give me the worst deal possible. I just want to write it.

• 31:29Pablo Torre?

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

• 31:32Speaker 04

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

• 31:49Pablo Torre?

  And he would have played, if he did play a character.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  He, in my mind, would have been Kekic. He was, he was Kekic.

• 31:57Pablo Torre?

  Agreed, agreed.

• 31:58Speaker 17

  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. Well, there you go. But we need a doc. That's what Peter's saying. That's just a movie. No, I want to, I want to know how far along in development this is. I've, I guess it's been in development a while, but it hasn't gotten the proper funding.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  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. 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.

• 32:40Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  That was, that was very nice, yes. I, I was very much hoping, coming off of Veep, that someone would more or less let me do it again, that I had, whatever, achieved enough, 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. So, that's kind of where we are at the moment.

• 33:17Pablo Torre?

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

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. Two, two Superman and Batman swap lives, exactly, yeah.

• 33:25Pablo Torre?

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

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Marilyn was fascinating. Marilyn was a real ballbreaker 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 Anne Hathaway seemed like a no-brainer.

• 33:59Speaker 18

  What's wrong with you? You can't just go around kissing people, particularly not engaged people.

• 34:03Pablo Torre?

  You enjoyed it. You want to kiss again? I suppose that it's worth noting that actresses who are considered at least mentioned, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weisz, Rebecca Hall.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  You know, it's interesting. Susan Kecic, 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 fleshed out character. Because, it's funny, in a weird way, because 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 idolized character. So she, I never got to hear a flaw. Do you know what I mean?

• 34:50Pablo Torre?

  And the reason Fritz never told Dave about Sue's flaws, in all the time they spent together, and all the time Dave spent researching Fritz's life, it brings us finally, finally, to the most stunning part of one of the most bat crazy sagas in sports history, which is that Fritz and Sue never broke up. Seriously, I'm looking at the timeline here. Fritz and Sue got married in 1974, the year after the trade got announced, and what still blows the mind of the PR guy who organized those dueling pressers, our old pal Marty, it's that Fritz and Sue proceeded to stay together for more than 50 fucking years.

• 35:37Speaker 11

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

• 35:46Speaker 11

  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, so it is maybe the greatest of all American love stories.

• 36:03Pablo Torre?

  And Fritz, in various interviews he gave over the years, could not agree more. I mean, just listen to him.

• 36:12Speaker 19

  The kids probably, a couple of them probably aren't really happy about it, but you know what? They're in their late 40s now and they're doing fine. They're good kids. So to that regard, that wasn't a problem either. I mean, they probably wish it wouldn't have happened, but I don't know how it could not have happened some way. 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.

• 36:45Pablo Torre?

  All of which leaves me with just one more question for Dave Mandell.

• 36:52Pablo Torre?

  What is the ending of your movie, such as it was, was what?

• 36:57Speaker 04

  The basic end was ultimately, Kekic is traded off to Cleveland and then bounces whatever. And then Fritz is traded off. They just, they cast him aside.

• 37:09Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, like a year later, right.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  He had an 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. 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'd trade him to Cleveland as well. Kekic is long gone. They're not teammates again, but they are, they are there.

• 37:36Pablo Torre?

  There's a cosmic connection that persists.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. 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. And I think, 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 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, if you will, sort of Billy Wilder, "Nobody's Perfect," something like it hot last line, "Want a trade?" or something like that.

• 38:15Pablo Torre?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  That was my end. 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. I guess that's, that's my end.

• 38:31Pablo Torre?

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

• 38:40Pablo Torre?

  For Mike Kekic.

• 38:58Pablo Torre?

  All right, so the episode is not over yet. And it's not over yet because 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, I got an alert on my phone that made me need to sit down.

• 39:17Pablo Torre?

  The headline from the Associated Press read, "Fritz Peterson, Yankees pitcher who traded wives with teammate Mike Kekic, dies at age 81."

• 39:30Pablo Torre?

  It turns out that Fritz had been fighting lung cancer. I didn't know about this, in part because I never got to talk to Fritz Peterson myself.

• 39:41Pablo Torre?

  In 2018, Fritz's family had posted on Facebook that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which is why talking to Dave Mandell in the first place was so important to this episode. 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. 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. What we didn't know was that Fritz had actually died at his home in Minnesota back in October of 2023,

• 40:26Pablo Torre?

  according to county records, which means that Fritz's death had been kept secret for, yeah, about half a year. 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. And then the AP checked the county records, and then people realized that Fritz had been gone long before they realized it.

• 40:55Pablo Torre?

  And all of it explains why reporting this story over the last six months had been so difficult and so strange. I presumed that Sue wouldn't want to talk in public about any of this stuff. But now realizing that she had lost her husband of 50 years. 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. And only in retrospect do I now realize what this was.

• 41:30Pablo Torre?

  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. And so it did feel appropriate that the real last scene in this real-life love story just was it for the rest of us to see.

• 42:08Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 42:14Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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