Kekich and Peterson made strangest trade in '73

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"We didn't swap wives -- we swapped lives."

-- Mike Kekich

"Don't make anything sordid out of this."

-- Fritz Peterson

Yeah, right.

It was only the strangest trade in baseball history.

On March 5, 1973, at the New York Yankees' spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson announced they had swapped wives, two children apiece and even family dogs. (For the record, the Kekiches had a terrier, the Petersons a poodle.)

This would have been big news had the two hurlers -- both left-handers, of course -- played in, say, Milwaukee or Cincinnati. But because they pitched for baseball's most famous club in the nation's largest city, the unexpected news traveled faster than any pitch thrown by either.

It didn't matter that a syndicate headed by an unknown Cleveland shipbuilder named George Steinbrenner just had bought the Yankees from CBS. It didn't matter that Yankees journeyman Ron Blomberg would become baseball's first designated hitter a few weeks later. The story throughout baseball that spring clearly was Kekich and Peterson.

Or Peterson and Kekich. To many, the two seemed interchangeable -- in public and, more interestingly, in private.