Moe Berg attended Princeton and was a star thirdbaseman for their
baseball team. After graduation he signed with both the Brooklyn Robins
(as the Dodgers were then known) and Columbia Law School. After his
initial season with the Robins in which he batted a paltry .186, he
was sent to Minneapolis and Toledo. He returned to the majors with the
White Sox in 1926. When all three White Sox catchers went down with
injuries, Manager Ray Schalk looked down the bench and asked in anyone
could catch. Berg replied that he used to think he could but his high
school coach told him differently. Schalk sent him into the game asking
him to prove the high school coach wrong. Berg did and became a
fixture at catcher. He reported late the next two years so that he
could finish his studies at Columbia from which he graduated in 1930.
In 1934 he went on a tour of Japan with some other baseball
players. During this visit he talked his way into St. Luke's Hospital
on the pretense of visiting a patient. Instead he went to the roof and
used a motion picture camera to photograph the Tokyo skyline. These
films were used by General Doolittle in planning his April 1942 air raid
on Tokyo, although their contribution was minimal.
He continued his playing career until 1939 after which he became a
coach for the Boston Red Sox. One of his most famous students was Ted
Williams. In his second year, Williams wanted to mold himself after
Gehrig or Ruth. Berg encouraged him not to, but to emulate Shoeless Joe
Jackson instead. He told Williams he had the best wrist action he had
ever seen and he should use that.
Berg spoke at least seven languages and some say as many as
twelve. When told this, Senator outfielder Dave Harris famously
commented "Yeah, and he cant hit in any of them."
In 1943 Berg was recruited into the OSS by Colonel "Wild Bill"
Donovan (although a general when he retired form active service, Donovan
preferred to be addressed as Colonel). Berg was assigned to the
Balkans and spent the next two years moving throughout occupied Europe.
His basic assignment was to meet and seek out European physicists and
encourage them to defect. At one point, he was sent to Zurich to
determine how much a particular physicist knew about atomic weapons.
His orders were to kill the man if he thought the Germans were getting
close. Berg determined that they were not and so the physicist lived.
Berg returned to the US in April 1945 and resigned from the OSS.
He was awarded the Medal of Freedom which he refused to accept (his
sister, with whom he lived the last 12 years of his life, accepted for
him after his death). Although both the White Sox and the Red Sox
wanted him to return to coaching, Berg declined. In the 50's he was
hired by the CIA to investigate the Soviet atomic program using his
contacts from WWII. The CIA paid him $10,000 for expenses but got
virtually nothing in return.
For the remainder of his life, Berg lived off family and friends
who tolerated him because of his immense charisma. He died on May 29,
1972 from injuries suffered from a fall at home. The nurse attending
him said that his final words were "How did the Mets do today?" (They
had won.) A fitting ending to a man who when once criticized for wasting
his intellectual talents on baseball replied, "I would rather be a
ballplayer than a Justice of the Supreme Court."
Editor's Note: If you want to learn more about Moe, read the book written about his life called, "The Catcher Was a Spy".
No comments:
Post a Comment