The Oddest Duck Ever To Play Baseball
Oh, and He Earned the Medal of Freedom for Being a Spy Too.
Ask any sports fan who Moe Berg is and you’re more than likely to get a “Who?” than a straightforward answer. As a player, as Bob Uecker would often describe himself, Berg “strived every day just to attain mediocrity.” If you look at his lifetime stats, you won’t see anything remarkable; in fact, you’d probably wonder how this guy managed to stay in the pros for fifteen seasons. And yet a medal of his is in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Why?
Because it’s what he did off the field that mattered.
Moe was born to Ukrainian immigrants in New York in 1902. The youngest of 3 kids, the family soon moved to an ethnically diverse area in New Jersey.1 Socially, he was a bit awkward and didn't relate to others very well. Growing up in such a place, with so many diverse languages, Berg turned into a young polyglot, learning everyone’s native language to more regularly converse with the other kids and their families. As he grew, he became a moderately decent baseball player. After graduating, he went to Princeton where he graduated magna cum laude in modern languages, mastering seven at the time. His senior year, he was captain of the Princeton baseball team, and eventually signed with the majors.
After his first season, he took a trip abroad to Paris where he took 32 classes at the Sorbonne. He also began his lifelong habit of reading 10 newspapers daily.2 Rather than return to baseball for spring training, he instead toured Italy and Switzerland. Feeling he was uncommitted to baseball, he was released and he bounced around from team to team. It wasn’t until he was moved to catcher (because of injuries to the other catchers on the team) did he flourish; not as a player, but as a charmer; he emerged out of that social awkwardness by relating to some of the more socially mifit people in America, ballplayers. He wasn’t bad at the position, and had a good arm. But what he could do really well is talk people up. He got along famously with other teams’ stars when they came to the plate and gabbed. Even better, as he spent most seasons in the bullpen warming up pitchers, he made great relations with many of the star players in his day over games of catch. It was often thought that he was kept around the majors on minimum value contracts just to keep the pitchers happy.
But as a player, he was an utterly unremarkable major league catcher, playing in 100 games in a season only once. He really lived for the off season when he went to Columbia Law School, and upon graduation and passing the bar working for a Wall Street firm. Famed Baseball coach Casey Stengel referred to Berg as “The strangest man ever to play baseball.”
In the early ‘30s, baseball was starting to gain popularity in Japan, and Major League Baseball sent a contingent of players for a goodwill tour and to play as an exhibition. Among the players were Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, and this third string catcher from the Boston Red Sox named Moe Berg. Why was he included? Because he was the only player who spoke fluent Japanese. It was suggested Moe and Babe Ruth frequented many a geisha house in Tokyo and Moe was relied on by the other players to converse with locals. He was the most popular player on the team, and the Japanese press loved him. Upon meeting Emperor Hirohito, when protocol dictated he not even look him in the eye, Berg talked very casually with him and the Emperor amusingly responded to him, diffusing the whole faux pas. On one such trip to Japan, he climbed to the roof of the Tokyo hospital and using an old MovieReel camera, took a film recording of the entire Tokyo skyline. Upon learning of his release from the White Sox while in Japan, instead of coming home he instead traveled to the Philippines, Korea and Moscow in the Soviet Union.
Once he returned to the states, he became a coach, bounced around the league and still hung around baseball circles. In 1939, he appeared on the radio game show “Information Please” where he would astound people with his trivial knowledge on so many different subjects. Of his appearance, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis told him, "Berg, in just thirty minutes you did more for baseball than I've done the entire time I've been commissioner" He made two more appearances on the program.
Moe Gets Into the War Effort
Soon following Pearl Harbor, and the mobilization to war, Moe took that film reel of Tokyo to intelligence officials, hoping it could be useful. In fact, the government had no good pictures of how modern Tokyo looked, and the best they had were dated maps from 20 years prior. Berg’s film showed factories, military installations, and potential targets for bombing strikes. The film eventually got into the hands of the OSS, the forerunner of today’s CIA. It didn’t take long for them to figure out what they had in Berg; a charming, intelligent man who by now spoke a dozen languages fluently, who had friends and contacts all around the world and had a way about him that put people at ease. They recruited Berg to work as a spy for the United States government.
At first they sent him to Central and Latin America, under the guise of expanding baseball,3 to meet with officials and find out how friendly these countries would be to the US war effort. He was then sent to Yugoslavia to help support Balkan resistance efforts, and then to Italy where he was a part of a group smuggling Italian scientists out of fascist Italy. While interviewing the Italian physicists, he learned a lot about nuclear physics and the German effort to make a bomb. He bounced around Europe accumulating information on the German bomb effort, and was even sent to Zurich to attend a conference where the head of the German bomb program, Werner Heisenberg was to speak. He was actually given authority to assassinate Heisenberg if it looked like Germany was on the cusp of making the atomic bomb; Berg assessed based on all his knowledge that they were nowhere near it and relented.
The War is Over for Berg
When he left the OSS after the end of the War, Berg lost his purpose somewhat. For his work during the war, President Truman offered him the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Berg declined it saying what he did was just his duty as an American. Berg received a handful of votes in Baseball Hall of Fame voting (four in 1958, and five in 1960), but those had more to do with what he did off the field than on it. He no longer had baseball to fall back on, continued his habits of reading daily newspapers voraciously, and kind of skulked about. He lived parasitically off of his brother for 17 years, who finally got tired of his slovenly bachelor living and evicted him. After that he lived with his sister until his death at the age of 70. His ashes were spread over Mount Scorpus in Israel as per his wishes.
Following his death, Ethel Berg requested that his declined Medal of Freedom be offered posthumously, which was done. Berg’s Medal of Freedom now sits on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In addition, his baseball card is the only one on display at the CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA.
Not bad for a mediocre baseball player from Jersey.
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
Moe died after a serious fall at the hospital he was at, in Bellevue, NY. His final words were “How did the Mets do today?”
The Mets had won.
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
Of course, we’re giving it to Moe.
When he was criticized for "wasting" his intellectual talent on the sport he loved, Berg replied, "I'd rather be a ballplayer than a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
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Footnotes and Fun Stuff
Despite being Jews themselves, Berg’s father, Bernard Berg, was adamant about living in an area without many Jews. The neighborhood he moved to in New Jersey was diverse with many Italian, Puerto Rican/Spanish, German, and other European immigrants. Berg had a rocky relationship with his father, who always saw Moe as wasting his intelligence and talents on baseball. The day his father died was the day he took a film clip of the Tokyo skyline to the OSS.
He was famously territorial when it came to his papers. If he had not yet finished reading it yet, he considered it “active” and that paper was not allowed to be touched by others. Only when he was done with that newspaper were others allowed to read it.
Baseballs popularity in Central America and the Caribbean can be traced to Berg’s initial tours of some of these countries. It’s still bearing fruit today, as a very large percentage of MLB players come from Central and South America.