Switch Pitchers

It began last spring as a joke. The friendly foursome saw a movie together and then went out partying. That was when the idea first came up. "We laughed about it like a bunch of high school kids," one of the four recalls. Six months later, the idea became a reality when New York Yankee Pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson swapped wives, Peterson's wife Marilyn moving in with Mike while Susanne Kekich went to live with Fritz.

Last week Mike and Fritz publicly acknowledged what Susanne, with a giggle, calls "the most unique trade in baseball history." The players also let it be known that the switch (an open secret in the baseball world for months) is already going sour. True, Fritz and Susanne are still living together. But Marilyn has gone home to her mother, leaving Mike, in his words, "out in the cold, the only one who has nothing."

The relationship between the Petersons and Kekiches began conventionally in 1969, when Kekich joined the Yankees and the two pitchers became friends. Their families began seeing a lot of each other and, Kekich says, there was "a tremendous amount of affection and compatibility all around." Indeed there was. It became more than that about the time of the movie double date last year and really peaked in July. According to Susanne, "We left a party together and sat in Fritz's car considering the idea of going home with opposite partners." Deciding to discuss it further at a nearby restaurant, Susanne says,

"Fritz and I went in one car and Mike and Marilyn in the other. They didn't show up for 2 1/2 hours."

Fritz takes the story from there: "Mike started to campaign for my wife about last August. He told me he loved Marilyn more than Susanne. There wasn't anything dirty about it." Within a month, Susanne told the New York Post, she and Fritz began sleeping together. But, she admits, "Mike and Marilyn had a much more romantic, exciting relationship than Fritz and I." She insists, nevertheless, that her affair "was not on the rebound because Mike and Marilyn fell in love."

Whatever their motives, the four held a conference sometime that summer and decided on a trial swap, agreeing, with remarkable forethought, that if the trade were not agreeable to everyone, all would go back to their original partners. In the course of this parley, no detail was overlooked. Each couple had two children, so it was decided that the older child of each marriage would live with his father, the younger one with his mother. There was even an agreement to exchange family dogs.

Guilty. For a while after the swap, things were rosy; as the talkative Susanne related last week, "Mike and Marilyn were thrillingly in love. I thought it was so beautiful." They all thought it so beautiful, in fact, that they contemplated not only a double divorce but a double wedding. Then the glow faded. On December 5, they switched back to their original partners, but "Marilyn cried for Mike," Fritz says, and the attempted reconciliation lasted only nine days. On December 14, there was another, presumably last switch. But Marilyn, influenced by what Mike calls her "background," felt too guilty to continue living with him and moved out.

At week's end the two couples' biggest worry, apparently, was what people would think. "Don't make this out to be Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," Susanne admonished reporters. "Don't say this was wife swapping," Mike echoes, "because we didn't swap wives, we swapped lives." Other members of the Yankees rallied around their teammates. Said Outfielder Ron Swoboda: "This is a now situation, and baseball players are part of the now world." Catcher Thurman Munson agreed. "It ain't going to bother me," he said. "The only thing that's going to bother me is what they do on the mound." Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn predicted a "strained relationship" between Teammates Fritz and Mike ("I'd like to kill him," Mike said furiously). Nonetheless Yankee General Manager Lee MacPhail dismissed rumors that one of the pitchers would soon be involved in a conventional trade to avoid dissension. But he did admit to one concern: "We may have to call off Family Day."

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