The Yankee Wife-Swap Scandal

EPISODE 96: Stranger than fiction.

The reason today’s odyssey brought me to David Mandel is not because he has written for Seinfeld and The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Veep.

The reason I’m talking to Dave Mandel is because Dave is the key to telling you a story that I’ve been trying to report out for a very, very long time:

The Yankee Wife Swap.

Dave had spent years researching The Trade, as he called it, for a long-rumored screenplay he wrote years ago: a movie that was at one point supposed to star Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

And while The Trade never got made, for reasons that continue to baffle me, today is my attempt at a consolation prize.

We’ve spent months interviewing a range of primary sources who took us behind the scenes of what really happened to two real-life best friends, two starting pitchers for the New York Yankees, named Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich.

Who, in 1973, agreed to the most insane transaction in the history of sports.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Lovingly,

Pablo