"I guess we'll have to cancel Family Day."—Lee MacPhail

 

Sorry, but I'm not finished with our resident wife-swapper/child-swapper/dog-swapper yet.  

I know, I know: it was the '70s, the stoned stepchild of the late 1960s, the time of car-key parties and the like. (In the small town where I grew up, some would-be hipsters even approached my parents about taking part in such. They reacted with such horror I think they wore garlic cloves around their necks for the next year.)

But I digress.

Never mind the damage that the Petersons and Kekichs did to each other—or to their kids, whose shrink bills must approach the national debt by now. (I hear the dogs were so depressed they didn't chase a single squirrel for weeks.) That's all incalculable. Many of the obits noted that Fritz and the Second Mrs. Peterson, a.k.a. Susanne Kekich, married and stayed together for the rest of their lives which is, I guess admirable.

Unfortunately, Fritz also to decided to become a born-again Christian, and a loud one at that. The loud part, I mean. This side of human sacrifice (or dog torture), I begrudge no one their religious beliefs. 

What got me was when Fritz decided to set himself up as the sort of Pontiff of Pitching, publicly proclaiming who was going to heaven and who was not. Hence the title of his 2009 book, Mickey Mantle Is Going to Heaven.

Now, first off, Mantle was 14 years dead by that time, and even with the bad knees, if The Mick was going to heaven, I'm sure he'd already got there. Second, Mickey Mantle was born into a toxic waste site, with a frighteningly cold mother, a relative who sexually molested him at a young age, and a surrounding culture that turned him into an alcoholic. Despite that, and despite all the damage he did to himself and his family, he gave us all countless hours of joy. 

If that doesn't qualify you for heaven, I don't know what does, and we don't need Fritz Fucking Peterson to tell us so.

Even worse was Peterson's planned next book: Joe DiMaggio Is In Hell. Yes, people, he actually planned to write that, at least until some p.r. guy or literary agent wrestled him to the ground and ripped the keyboard out of his wriggling, judging hands. 

I assume that, from The Swapper's POV, the Yankee Clipper was presumed to be in hell because he was a Catholic, or had not made some loud pronunciation of his faith, whatever that might have been. It never seems to have occurred to ol' Fritzie that assigning the great DiMaggio—OR ANYONE ELSE—his eternal destination might have been, shall we say, above his pay grade.

In his Bible-studying days, this world champion of chutzpah might have more closely studied Christ's words in Matthew 6:5:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

Hey, I hope Fritz got the shock of his life at the pearly gates, when Joe D. was there to give him a gruff slap on the head. I hope all the old Yankees of my childhood who have passed on were there, too, along with pretty much everyone else who has made it through this vale of tears. 

(Walter O'Malley, I'm not so sure about, but I'm willing to consider. Apparently, he was very nice to his wife, who was not able to do more than whisper after surviving a bout with laryngeal cancer. So maybe.)

God bless and goodspeed, Fritz. And next time—if there is a next time around—try not to be such a horse's ass.