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I.
On September 17, 1969, a pitcher named Fritz Peterson took to the mound at Yankee Stadium for a meaningless baseball game against the Washington Senators. The Yankees were a middling team playing out the string; Peterson was a very good pitcher in the midst of one of his best seasons, though he happened to be marooned in the Bronx during one of the most lackluster eras in team history. He threw five strong innings. The Yankees won, 2-1; Peterson finished the season with 17 wins, 16 losses, and a 2.55 earned-run average.
The night before, at a theater a few miles to the south in Lincoln Center, a film called “Bob and Carol and Ted Alice” became the first American movie to debut on opening night at The New York Film Festival. It was a subversive comedy that centered around a pair of narcissistic middle-aged couples who consider having an orgy. A reviewer called it “one of the wisest, wittiest, wickedest comedies ever to have come out of Hollywood,” an exemplar of the new Hollywood movement toward stories that shattered cultural norms (and eventually fostered the greatest era for movies in modern history).
Years later, Fritz Peterson, who died recently at the age of 82, would insist that his life was nothing like that movie—that the choice he made alongside his teammate, pitcher Mike Kekich, and their wives, wasn’t driven by midlife angst or raging libido. It just felt, to all of them, like a natural thing to do. It was a decision made with deliberate thought and care. But even now, it remains one of the most unique stories in baseball history. And whether Peterson and Kekich and their wives meant it this way or not, their choice has become an artifact of an era when the entire country was re-examining its relationship with itself.
II.
Three years later, during spring training in 1972, Kekich and his wife Susanne went out to a movie one night with Peterson and his wife, Marilyn. They had a few drinks, and someone brought up the idea of trading partners. They laughed it off “like a bunch of high-school kids,” Susanne later said.
They didn’t think about it again until July, when they attended a party together and sat in Peterson’s career, discussing what would happen if they went home with the opposite partner. They drove to a diner in nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey, talked it over, and decided to do it. And they kept doing it for the rest of the season. And after a brief attempt at reconciliation over the holidays, they decided to keep doing it.
They didn’t just swap partners. They swapped lives. The kids and the dogs went with their mothers. The Kekich family lived in the new house Peterson constructed in New Jersey; the Peterson family moved into Kekich’s old house in the same town. They would be friends with entirely new families; they would divorce and then remarry. “This is a now situation we’re watching,” said their Yankees teammate, Ron Swoboda, “and baseball players are part of the now world.”
Sure, maybe other people viewed it that way. But the four of them didn’t. They genuinely felt as if this was the right thing to do, given their feelings. This wasn’t just a now thing, and it sure as hell wasn’t Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. “That was just an old smutty wife-swap,” Susanne told longtime Newsday writer Steve Jacobson. “This wasn’t that.”
III.
So what was it, then? The Kekich and Peterson story—combined with the divorce of the Louds, the seemingly typical clan documented in PBS’s documentary An American Family— heightened fears that the American family as we knew it was somehow dying in the wake of the social changes of the 1960s. But really, the family wasn’t dying; the dynamic was just shifting. The oil crisis and subsequent recession in 1973, wrote author Kelli Maria Korducki, coincided with a steady 50-year decline in the traditional nuclear family; new types of families have since emerged in its wake. Fifty years later, there is still angst over what all of this means, and there are still political opportunists who insist that non-traditional models are a threat to society itself, rather than focusing on the underlying dynamics that make any type of family strong.
“No two families are alike,” one expert told a concerned journalist in 1973. “Nor should they be. No one model exists.”
As with any model, sometimes it doesn’t work. Yet sometimes it does. Mike and Marilyn’s relationship dissolved soon after it went public. But Fritz and Susanne? They were married for 50 years, up until the day of Peterson’s death.
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Swapping partners. For those 4 involved bad news. So unbiblical. Can't imagine how it was on the kids. Confusing? Way more than confusing. I hope they turned out okay.