Pablo Torre Finds Out - Stranger Than Fiction: Behind the Scenes of the Yankees Wife-Swap Scandal

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

In the early 1970s, two pitchers for the New York Yankees agreed to the wildest trade in sports history: They switched wives. And children. And furniture. And pets. But this sex scandal cut way deeper than the tabloid headlines. David Mandel — veteran writer for Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep and The Simpsons — laments his big-screen adaptation that never was... even though the ultimate passion project could have starred Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And we go deep inside a story that's equal parts swinging and missing.This episode previously aired April 30, 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. No, but it's quite a thing. The Yankees now have a manager, three coaches, and a marriage counselor. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. 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. But how should I introduce you? you because there's a lot to introduce, I suppose. 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 going to, that's sort of as good as it's going to get

vis-à-vis death. So, yeah. 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, long-time Seinfeld writer, was in fact responsible. So he's Bizarro Jerry. Bizarro Jerry?

Yeah, like Bizarro Superman. Superman's 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. Shouldn't he say bad bye? Isn't that the opposite of goodbye? No, it's still goodbye.

Does he live underwater? No. Is he black? Look, just forget the whole thing, all right? But the reason today's Odyssey has brought me to Dave Mandel is not because he is written for Seinfeld. And The Simpsons, and Saturday Night Live, and Kirby 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... 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. A couple of quick questions about you getting, doing a production deal with Ben Affleck

kind of going back in business again. True or false, are you going to make a movie together where you play wife-swapping Yankees. 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 care to. 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, my favorite team, named Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich. 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? 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. We wrote that. We co-wrote that together and friends, whatever, all those good things. I am Peter Melman, longtime sports fan and occasional writer. 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 Kekich 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. Dave grew up in Manhattan, and I think he grew up on scandal. 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 kind of, remember being excited to tell him about Mike Kekich 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 two pitchers on the team, two lefties, have swapped family.

not just wives, they swap their entire families. 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, I know it sounds silly, but it's as simple as, boy, that sounds like a great movie. 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, Kekich especially. Fritz, Peterson, was the more straight-laced of the two. Kekich

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. So I need you to know that Dave's story, his reporting here hinges on these exclusives. 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 Kekich, whose wife's name was Susan, really were this genuine duo, this pair of best friends and road

roommates who are 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 Kekich was wilder, on the mound, and crucially in romance. Mike was visibly more confident, more experienced, more aggressive in that realm. And very late one evening, in July 1972, both the Peterson's 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 or 3 a.m.

We were all drinking beer and having 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. 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. Because again, Mike was more aggressive, but Fritz was a good teammate. And I said, hey, why don't you, Marilyn, why don't you go back to my? At the time, your wife is Marilyn.

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. There was this mutual decision, very both fake and yet organic, of why don't I drive you? 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. And then two hours later, fill in the blanks, Mike Kekich emerges with, with Marilyn, Fritz's. We just had a very good time, actually innocently.

Right. 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. 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 mean. matter, I love her, I want to be with her, I love him, I want to be with him, vice versa. 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 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. And Fritz Peterson, by the way, was clearly falling for Sue Kekich 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. And no, they weren't swapping wives. That's, I think, still the biggest misconception about the whole deal here.

The Peterson's and the Kekiches were actually swapping. shopping husbands. Everything else in their households, according to the trade, their children, their pets, the furniture, their houses, would remain as it was with Marilyn and Sue. There was just a matter of, you know, a pitching change. My name is Rick Dempsey. My position, I'm a catcher.

I joined the Yankees as a catcher in 1972 through 76. And Rick's job, in the most literal sense, was to know what Fritz and Mike were going to throw at him. I get it occasionally. Every couple of years, somebody will say, oh, weren't you there when Mike Cactiffs 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. How did you learn that the swap was happening? Well, they called a meeting in the clubhouse to talk about it, you know. And 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? 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 Steinbruder, had asked everybody to just kind of shy away from it. 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 Kekich at 10 a.m.

And one with Fritz Peterson at 4 p.m. A truly unprecedented to double-header for the PR staffer in charge. I'm Marty Appell, a longtime historian from 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. But you should probably know that Marty was 20. 24 years old on the day in question.

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 beatwriters who were covering spring training. Some phone calls came through, but it was the era before, before even People magazine, let alone extradited. 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 an off day where we had all gone out on a yacht for a cruise out in New York Harbor. And the Peterson's and the Kekicages were in the photograph together. So that became sort of, aha, we got a photo of them. And then eventually almost a week later, as memory serves, Johnny Carson makes his first joke about it. You know, the sports writers have been saying in 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 child to be named later. Part of what my research was indicating as I was 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, look, this isn't that weird, right? Like, this doesn't have to be that weird. He wanted to sort of 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 going to stay the same. 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. No, it's going to be a strange year in baseball. Ump says play ball and everybody throws their keys into the ballpark. 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. What happened in the immediate days after was that Fritz and Susan Kekich 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 true. 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 going to have to get traded. Within a week, it was obvious that Mike Kackich 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. 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, via Fritz Peterson, that Kekich felt cheated.

It's incredible, man. This is incredible. The idea that it starts with, like, the physical lust, the testosterone, the pheromones of Mike Kekich and Marilyn Biederson together. And they're late because they were fucking before that diner meeting. And now they are realizing, oh, no, it's the other couple that is way more into this. There's a sense from Maryland of, like, what have I done?

Like, what about my thing? But from the Kekich side, just a real sense of like, what about me? I lost. I should, I deserve more. And there's a jealousy, a weird jealousy, not necessarily about the wife, but rather, you beat me. It does feel like this is a turning point for Mike Kekich. That from there, the arc of his story does proceed to get gloomier. Well, yeah.

the Yankees make a very quick and easy choice, which is Peterson versus Kekich, and they trade him, they trade him off to Cleveland, which as bad as the Yankees were, Cleveland was the bottom of the barrel. And just to be clear, the decision to trade Mike was quick and easy simply because Fritz was the better picture, 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 year, the dissolution of a best friendship, the dissolution of multiple relationships, of multiple families, on multiple levels, all of that was shattering. It was heartbreakingly difficult. And as crazy as all of it obviously was, PR guy Marty Appel

was shocked. I never saw that coming. And 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. But it does begin a long, downward spiral, I guess, for Kekich that I guess ends with him asking us to buy him a speedboat. So I got to explain the speedboat thing,

because Dave Mandel never talked to Mike Kekich. Mike Kekich had a trade proposal, it turns out, of his own. He would talk to Hollywood Dave Mandel if Dave Mandel bought him a speedboat. 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. 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. Lately, I've been pitching fairly miserably.

In the last two games, I got pounded pretty severely. Kekich gave up eight hits this night. And last check, Mike Kekich 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 Maryland, 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 Kekich's friendship with Fritz Peterson, that best friendship at the core of this whole thing. I deferred out of 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. And Peter remembers it like this. I kind of took my cue from Dave because 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, 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. 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, did Kekich 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. All right.

So no, none is this 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. Because all of this started, let's remember, with an absurdist premise, worthy of Seinfeld or Veep or S&L or curb your enthusiasm.

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. What are you fucking kidding me? You think we're going to have a nice divorce? if we ever get to force. No fucking way.

I'm taking you for everything you have, mister. I'm taking your balls and I'm thumb-tacking them to the wall. Which is also, eurologically 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. I guess to me, the way of the way I sort of always thought about it was, unlike say a show like Seinfeld or VEP 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. I love that that's how much you cared about this. 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. And he would have played if he did play a character. He, in my mind, would have been Kekich. He was Kekich. 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 Kekich. Well, there you go. But we need to dock. That's what Peter's saying. That's just a movie. No, I want to know how far along the development this is. I guess it's been in development a while, but it hasn't gotten the proper funding.

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. 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 great note. That was very nice, yes.

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 it'd 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. Yeah, had you considered rebooting this as a Marvel movie perhaps? Yes, exactly. Two Superman and Batman Swap Wives, exactly, yeah. 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 wide. though. 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. What are you doing?

Particularly not engaged, people. You want to kiss again? I suppose that it's worth noting that, like, actresses who are considered, at least mentioned, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weiss, Rebecca Hall. You know, it's interesting. Susan Kekich, 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, in his,

telling she's the most idealized character. So she, I never got to hear a flaw. Do you know what I mean? 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 batch-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. That's the wonderful side of the story. That's a true love story. I mean, who goes 50 years? 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. And Fritz, in various interviews he gave over the years, could not agree more. I mean, just listen to him. 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 happen, 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 done. All of which leaves me with just one more question for Dave Mandel. What is the ending of your movie, such as it was, was what? 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 inside. Yeah, like a year later, right. that year and, you know, 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. Kekich is long gone.

They're not teammates again, but they are there. There's a cosmic connection that persists. 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 was sort of the end, which was my little bit of an attempt at sort of a, if you will, of Billy Wilder, nobody's perfect, some like it hot last line, want a trade or something like that. Right, right, right, right. 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 my end. So what I have found out at the end of this conversation is that we need to crowd fund a speedboat for Mike Kackich 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. The headline from the Associated Press read Fritz Peterson, Yankees pitcher who traded wives

with teammate Mike Kekich dies at age 81. 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. 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

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, 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.

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

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. This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.