Fritz Peterson

April 15, 1966. Memorial Stadium, Baltimore. A 24-year-old left-hander nobody outside the organization had heard of threw a complete game against the defending American League champions, walked nobody, and won 3-2. Fritz Peterson would spend the next eight years being exactly that pitcher -- unhittable in the way that mattered, even when he wasn't unhittable in the way that got noticed.

He'd win 20 games in 1970, anchor a rotation through the bleakest stretch the franchise had seen since before Babe Ruth arrived, and become -- of all things -- the answer to one of the strangest trivia questions in Yankees history. Then, in the spring of 1973, his personal life became a bigger story than anything he'd done on a mound, and less than a year later the Yankees traded him away in a deal the New York papers couldn't resist calling a massacre.

The Control Artist

Peterson grew up in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and pitched at Northern Illinois University, where he led the team in wins, innings, ERA, and strikeouts as a junior and earned All-Midwest honors. The Yankees signed him as an amateur free agent in 1963. He wasn't going to blow anyone away -- he didn't have the arm for it -- and he never tried to be something he wasn't. He worked corners, changed speeds, and threw strikes at a rate that made hitters uncomfortable in a completely different way than velocity did.

That command showed up immediately. His 1966 debut -- a complete game, three strikeouts, zero walks -- established the template he'd repeat for most of a decade. He finished that rookie season 12-11 with a 3.31 ERA, the best mark among Yankees starters who pitched regularly, on a team that lost 89 games and fired its manager in May. From 1968 through 1972, Peterson led the American League in the lowest walk rate five straight seasons. He led the league in WHIP in both 1969 and 1970. Somewhere in the game's long history of power pitchers, there was room for a lefty who got outs by refusing to give anything away for free.

The Best Year, and the Only One That Made the All-Star Team

His finest season, by any measure that isn't win total, came in 1969: 17-16 with a 2.55 ERA and the American League's best WHIP, a year in which he was probably the best pitcher on the Yankees' staff and got a mediocre won-loss record for the trouble of pitching for a team that couldn't score. The 20-win year came the following summer -- 20-11, a 2.90 ERA over 260.1 innings, and his only All-Star selection. It's the number everyone remembers about Fritz Peterson, and it's the least interesting thing about his career.

More telling was 1971, when he and Mel Stottlemyre combined for 543 innings and 32 complete games because the Yankees' bullpen couldn't be trusted with a lead and their lineup couldn't be trusted to build one. Peterson threw 274 of those innings himself. He'd go on to finish his Yankees tenure with the best career ERA -- 2.52 -- of any pitcher who ever threw a pitch in the original Yankee Stadium, a building that stood from 1923 to 2008 and saw plenty of arms come through it. Whitey Ford is second, at 2.58.

The Life Swap

In July 1972, Peterson and teammate Mike Kekich -- both left-handed pitchers, both close friends whose families had socialized together since 1969 -- began discussing an arrangement neither man would call an affair. By October, at the end of the season, they'd put it into effect: Kekich moved into the Peterson household with Peterson's wife, sons, and family dog. Peterson moved into the Kekich household with Kekich's wife, daughters, and dog. Both couples kept living that way, quietly, for months.

It stopped being quiet in early March 1973, at spring training in Fort Lauderdale. Peterson and Kekich held separate press conferences and told the assembled reporters what had happened. "It wasn't a wife swap," Kekich said. "It was a life swap." The story ran everywhere -- baseball had never had anything remotely like it, and the tabloids treated it accordingly.

One of the two arrangements lasted. Peterson and Susanne Kekich married in 1974 and stayed married until his death nearly five decades later. Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson split up not long after the story became public. Peterson, looking back on it decades later, told an interviewer it wasn't really a wife swap at all -- "it was a husband trade -- Mike for me or me for Mike." The Yankees, for their part, wanted the distraction gone. They got their wish the following spring.

The Friday Night Massacre

On April 26, 1974, new general manager Gabe Paul sent four pitchers to Cleveland -- Peterson, Fred Beene, Steve Kline, and Tom Buskey -- for first baseman Chris Chambliss, reliever Dick Tidrow, and pitcher Cecil Upshaw. The New York press immediately dubbed it the Friday Night Massacre, an echo of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre from six months earlier. Reaction inside the clubhouse wasn't much kinder. "You just don't trade four pitchers," Stottlemyre reportedly said at the time.

It didn't look like a fair trade in April 1974, and for a while it wasn't -- Peterson still had useful innings left in him, Upshaw's Yankees run amounted to one middling relief season (36 games, a 1-5 record, a 3.02 ERA in 1974 before he was gone), and giving up a quarter of a pitching staff for an unproven first baseman felt reckless. History disagreed. Chambliss anchored first base for the rest of the decade and delivered the pennant-winning home run in 1976. Tidrow became one of the most durable relievers on back-to-back championship teams. Peterson pitched two and a half more seasons for Cleveland, made one final stop with the Texas Rangers in 1976, and retired with 133 career wins across three organizations -- 109 of them, and the best years of his career, in pinstripes.

Peterson stayed connected to baseball and to the story that followed him everywhere. He revealed in 2018 that Alzheimer's disease would keep him from that year's Old-Timers' Day, an event he'd otherwise made a point of attending. He died on October 19, 2023, at his home in Winona, Minnesota, of lung cancer. He was 81. Susanne, his wife of nearly fifty years, outlived him. The trivia question outlived them both -- but so, longer than anyone expected in the spring of 1973, did the marriage that came out of it.