Peterson on the mound in the original Yankee Stadium; his 2.52 ERA pitching there was the lowest by any Yankee pitcher at home in the original Stadium, including Hall of Famer Whitey Ford.

When the late Jim Bouton battled cerebral amyloid angiopathy, I wrote of Bouton’s battle and received a surprise: a note from Bouton’s Yankee teammate and fellow pitcher Fritz Peterson. The note read, simply, “If anyone can beat this, Jim can.” Bouton couldn’t in the long run, of course. And neither could Peterson beat Alzheimer’s disease in the long run.

Peterson got his diagnosis in September 2017. He died Friday at 82. Seven months after his diagnosis, the righthander who owns the lowest earned run average of any man who pitched in the original Yankee Stadium (2.52) told New York Post writer Kevin Kernan his condition “was a wacky disease.”

“It’s been happening like that for me all year,” he told Kernan. “So it’s confusing . . . It’s something so different. I don’t want to look into what comes next because I just want to enjoy every day.” Easier said than done, alas.

“I can’t go places,” Peterson continued then. “Unless something comes medically that can give me my mobility back . . . I can’t drive, so I’m depending on my wonderful wife. Whenever I get up I have to ask my wife, ‘What do we have today?’ As far as which doctors appointment. And when we do go somewhere. I have trouble walking, so I use a cane now. I feel like the old man from Scrooge.”

Fabled among fans for a sponge-like baseball memory, Peterson told Kernan his diagnosis would now keep him from attending Yankee Old-Timer’s Days, as he’d first planned to do during 2018. You can only guess the heartbreak that cause a man who loved engaging with fans on Facebook.

Peterson was a good lefthanded pitcher who grew up in the Chicago area (his favourite ballplayer was White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce) and arrived when the 1960s Yankees hit below bottom. His righthanded rotation mate Mel Stottlemyre arrived in time to help pitch those Yankees to their final pennant before the Lost Decade to come. The franchise’s first last place finish since 1912 happened in Peterson’s rookie 1966.

His roommate Bouton and Hall of Famer Whitey Ford were fading due to arm and shoulder issues. The remaining Yankee legends (Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Elston Howard) were reduced by age and injuries to box office appeal alone, what remained of it. Their few other good 1960s prospects proved journeyman major leaguers at best.

Peterson and Stottlemyre had a mutual admiration society, though Peterson was quick to name their pecking order.  “I always came in number two,” he cracked to Kernan. “Like Hertz and Avis, it was Stottlemyre and me.” That from a pitcher who led the American League in walks/hits per innings pitched back-to-back (1969-1970) and with the lowest walks per nine innings rate in five straight seasons (1968-72).

Prankish and fun-loving, Peterson found himself relieved of Bouton as a roommate before Bouton was plucked for the Seattle Pilots in the expansion draft for 1969. “They thought I was a bad influence on Fritz,” Bouton would write in Ball Four. “The Yankees had some funny ideas about bad influence . . . As for teaching Peterson the wrong things, the only thing I ever taught him was how to throw that changeup he uses so effectively. And he still enjoys giving me the credit.”

Peterson himself remembered best his 1 July 1966 game against the White Sox, when he took a perfect game to the eighthwith one out—and lost it when his own throwing error enabled the first White Sox baserunner before veteran White Sox catcher John Romano sent a base hit back up the middle. Peterson surrendered a run-scoring double and a sacrifice fly to follow, then made the inning-ending putout and pitched a scoreless ninth tio finish the 5-2 Yankee win.

“No immortality for me,” he’d remember in 2015.

That plus the changeup Bouton taught him were nothing compared to the changeup that came into Peterson’s wheelhouse in 1972.

Left to right: Marilyn Peterson, Mike Kekich, Susanne Kekich, Fritz Peterson. Photographed here aboard a schooner on a summer 1972 outing, the two pitchers had already exchanged spouses, well before making it public the following spring. Fritz and Susanne eventually married and stayed that way; Mike and Marilyn proved a short-lived match, after all.

Exit Bouton, enter Mike Kekich, a lefthanded pitcher whom the Yankees acquired from the Dodgers in a December 1968 trade. Like Peterson, Kekich was fun-loving and a bit on the adventurous and flaky side. (Peterson pre-Alzheimer’s loved to remember watching Kekich dive in Florida waters chasing a giant manta ray.) They’d become linked forever publicly in a far more jaw-dropping way in spring 1973.

The two pitchers and their wives went to a July 1972 barbeque at sportswriter Maury Allen’s home and first made their plans for what Kekich called a “life swap” but both Peterson and his old pal Bouton called “a husband swap.”

According to Allen and others, Peterson had once found himself sharing transportation with Susanne Kekich, and the latter’s husband had found himself likewise with Marilyn Peterson. The partners-to-be each found common grounds they’d come to lack in their incumbent marriages. All stayed among them alone until, as Allen recalled it in his 2000 book, All Roads Lead to October, Peterson came to him in January 1973 to say he had a story for him:

Peterson unloaded the facts of the story he wanted me to write. On that evening back in July at our home, he and Kekich had made the original plans for exchanging wives. Also kids, houses, furniture, dogs, and cats. The new families had been in operation for several months, everything was still going well, and he wanted to share his wonderful news with the world. He had chosen me as the conduit.

“Are you crazy?” I asked.

“No, we’d been thinking about this for many months,” he said. “We wanted you to write it because you won’t make it sound dirty.”

Allen resisted at first because, he wrote, he thought the entire deal should have remained private. Perhaps it should have. Indeed, Allen told Peterson to hand the story to United Press sportswriter Milton Richman, instead. Peterson did. Richman wrote it straight, no chaser, no salaciousness, and it still exploded into a scandal that only began with New York Daily News columnist Dick Young tearing them apart.

“At least,” the ever-sensitive Young wrote, “they did it before the inter-family trading deadline.”

The timing for going public couldn’t have been more ticklish in hindsight: George Steinbrenner finalised his purchase of the Yankees from CBS in the same month Peterson and Kekich elected to go public with their life swap, and he’d announced Mike Burke (the CBS executive assigned to run the team for the network) would stay as the team’s president. (Temporarily, as things turned out.)

Allen ultimately wrote a long article for The Ladies Home Journal about the Peterson-Kekich swap, with full cooperation and participation of both husbands and wives. For him, perhaps the most telling comment about the entire matter came from the erstwhile Mrs. Kekich, who married Peterson and stayed that way until death did they part, and who told Allen her marriage to Kekich crumbled long before the two couples began swapping lives.

I never could seem to live up to Mike’s standards. No matter what I did, he wanted me to do it a little better. I always felt unsure about him, uncertain about myself, a little insecure. Fritz accepted me as I was.

Kekich himself told Allen he thought he was matched better with Marilyn Peterson until “things developed and we began to butt heads.” Possibly the most reluctant partner in the swap (and possibly the most stressed by it), Mrs. Peterson parted from Kekich soon enough, she to marry a doctor happily, according to Allen.

Peterson married the former Mrs. Kekich in 1974 and remained a father to his sons as well as a stepfather to his new wife’s daughters; the couple had a daughter together. Kekich, too, remained a father to his children while remarrying in due course. After several non-baseball ventures that failed, including in medicine and paramedicine, he moved to New Mexico before the turn of this century.

Kekich has been reported as comfortable out of the public eye as Peterson was in it when the occasions arrived, particularly at Yankee-related events and aboard social media, before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

The uproar may or may not have taken a toll on both men. Peterson pitched well below his top form in 1973, but he also came down with shoulder trouble. (Pre-1973: 3.10 fielding-independent pitching; 1974 through his retirement: 4.00.) Kekich had respected stuff but was prone to wildness before 1973; he finished his nine-season career with a 4.16 FIP and a 4.59 ERA.

Both pitchers would be traded away soon enough. Kekich was traded to the Indians during the 1973 season; Peterson was also traded there the following season, after Kekich had moved on from the team. His baseball career ended in 1976; Kekich’s, a year later. (A road accident caused Kekich his own shoulder issues.)

Bouton would remember Yankee manager Ralph Houk’s handling of the swap when compiling and editing “I Managed Good But, Boy, Did They Play Bad”, his anthology of writings about baseball managers.

As this book was going to press, Ralph Houk said one of the finest things I’ve ever heard him say . . . “The players’ lives are their own. We all have problems. You only go through this world once and everyone has a right to go through it happy.” This may indicate that Houk the manager is changing with the times, or it may be manager Houk’s way of minimizing the effect on his team while he waits to trade one of them. But it may also be a truer insight into Ralph Houk the person.

Peterson in 2015, during an interview on New York’s WPIX-TV, two years before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

The Peterson-Kekich scandal proved mild sauce compared to sports scandals past and future, of course. Peterson’s trade to Cleveland proved more beneficial to the Yankees: it brought them two mainstays of their pending championship revival, first baseman Chris Chambliss and relief pitcher Dick Tidrow.

He’d work in the insurance business, as a blackjack dealer, an eschatological monograph author, and even a play-by-play announcer in minor league hockey. He wrote three books including When the Yankees Were On the Fritz: Revisiting the Horace Clarke Era. He survived bankruptcy. Eventually, Peterson and his family moved to Iowa. (“We’re still on the honeymoon and it has been a real blessing,” he said of his once-controversial remarriage, in 2013.)

“I’m hanging on for my family—that’s the most important thing,” Peterson told the Post in 2018. “If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t care. Heaven is not a bad place to be. I think we are all saved and that we all are going to end up in heaven.” May heaven prove a far less judgmental place for him than earth did once upon a time.