Friday, March 6, 2009

Strange but True



Ok, it's not disc golf but it's a good one so I just had to share it with you and hope you enjoy it like I did.




"On this date 36 years ago, Yankee teammates Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich made it known that they had traded their families. Seriously. Their entire families including wives, kids and dogs. Kekick and his new "wife" broke up shortly thereafter while Peterson and his new wife may still be together and may have four kids of their own. You can't make it up."
That's right. Back in 1972, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, both pitchers for the New York Yankees, swapped families.
Peterson traded his wife, Marilyn, his two kids and a poodle for Susan Kekich, the two Kekich children and a Bedlington terrier.
"We didn't trade wives; we traded lives," Kekich said.
Said Yankees executive Dan Topping after the trade was announced during spring training of 1973, "We may have to call off Family Day this season."
Gibbs remembers
America was aghast. That was the year the American League instituted the designated hitter rule, but commissioner Bowie Kuhn received much more mail about the bizarre trade.
Mississippian Jake Gibbs, who retired from the Yankees after the 1971 season, was stunned to learn what his two former teammates had done. Gibbs caught both of them and remembers them as "fun-loving guys who brought their wives and children to the family picnics we used to have."
"Fritz and Mike were good friends. They were really close, and their families were close. I guess we just didn't know how close," Jake says, before adding a catcher's astute, philosophical addendum as the only plausible explanation.
"Of course," Jake says, matter-of-factly, "they were both left-handers. You can never tell about lefties."
Spoken like a true catcher.
Peterson, Gibbs says, was the better pitcher.
"Fritz had great stuff and super control," Gibbs says. "He had some great years. Kekich had good stuff, but he didn't always know where it was going."
Peterson achieved a career record of 133 wins, 131 losses, but he was never quite the same after the family swap and the outcry that followed. Kekich wasn't so successful before the swap and fell apart after it. He was traded to the Indians later that same year.
You must wonder, as I did, what became of them.
28 years later . . .
Peterson, the better pitcher, also appears to have gotten the better of the trade. Peterson married the former Susanne Kekich, and they have four children of their own. Marilyn Peterson and Mike Kekich never married. She apparently got cold feet and backed out.
Kekich and Peterson were never close again. Their lives have followed exceedingly divergent paths, even for left-handers.
Kekich played baseball in Japan and South America before trying medical school in Mexico. He now lives in New Mexico, where he is remarried, and, at last report, worked as an insurance adjuster.
Peterson, who became deeply religious following the swap, later became an evangelist, worked without success in real estate, and now works on a casino boat in Elgin, Ill.
In 1992, Kekich wryly observed, "Neither Fritz Peterson nor I will ever make it into the Hall of Fame."
At least not the one in Cooperstown.


Anybody ever feel like doing that? Don't answer if you're still married to that person.

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