Catcher Moe Berg played 15 seasons for five teams in the 1920s and 1930s, with a cumulative batting average of .243. Berg isn’t in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but he is ensconsed in the annals of American history. Here’s why.
Moe Berg was fluent in ten languages, graduated from Princeton University, and got a law degree from Columbia University. That language prowess helped him get a position with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA, when World War II broke out.
Berg, who was Jewish, drew a singular assignment: arrange a meeting with German scientist Werner Heisenberg to determine if Heisenberg’s work with nuclear energy was assisting the Germans in developing a nuclear bomb. If Berg determined that it was and that the Germans were close, he was to kill Heisenberg.
If this sounds like movie material, it is.
Based on the book of the same name, The Catcher Was a Spy was released in 2018 and details Berg’s captivating story. The opening credits come with the proviso, “based on a true story,” and Hollywood takes its usual liberties.
For example, because Berg was a lifetime bachelor, the movie hints strongly that Berg was homosexual. But Aviva Kemper, who produced a documentary on Berg entitled The Spy Behind Home Plate, dispels that notion. Kempner told the Los Angeles Times, “You know, Hollywood makes their movies with a kind of script development. I call this [documentary] the real story. The players who played with him talked about all these girlfriends, and then the testimony of Babe Ruth’s daughter saying [in “The Spy Behind Home Plate”], ‘I danced with him; he came onto me.’ He had a long-time relationship.”
The movie shows Berg with a girlfriend, so they get that part right. Berg’s cousin, Denise Shames, posited an interesting theory as to why Berg and his two siblings never married. “I think there’s a reason for that,” Shames told the LA Times. “I think it was an agreement they all made. It didn’t mean they didn’t have relationships; some were long-lasting. My mother told me that when Sam (Mo’s brother) was in medical school, he was studying genetics and understood something in the family should not be passed through to children.”
“I think Moe Berg is best explained as a mystery,” Major League Baseball historian John Thorn told the LA Times. “Berg is such an odd duck. He’s learned. He has a sense of humor and women like him. Yet he was a loner.” Casey Stengel once described Berg as “the strangest man ever to play baseball,” and actor Paul Rudd captures Berg’s enigmatic personality in the film. Thorn also pointed out that Berg’s closet was filled with identical black suits, so he dressed the same daily.
I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of baseball movies because, with some exceptions, they never seem to get the baseball right. I’m more interested in baseball movies with an interesting plot — like Eight Men Out about the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. Interestingly, The Catcher Was a Spy only has one baseball scene. It’s passable, although the players’ skill level is suspect. But that’s not the movie’s focus, which is a spy thriller that is made more interesting because it is true. The film builds to the climax of Berg’s dramatic meeting with Heisenberg in 1944 — again, most likely ratcheted up by Hollywood.
The irony of Berg, a Jew, spying on the Nazis increases the tension. “If he had been caught, can you imagine what would have happened to him?” asked Kempner. “He would have been assassinated on the spot.”
Despite his law degree and offers to coach in the major leagues after the war, Berg elected to live with his brother, Dr. Samuel Berg, in New Jersey. He spent the rest of his life unemployed, living off the goodwill of family and friends. When people asked Berg what he did for a living, he would slowly draw his finger to his lips as if to silence both the question and answer, giving the impression that he was still a spy, which he was not.
“You know how many people peak very early in life?” said Shames of Berg’s behavior. “They live on those laurels for a long, long time.”
The book on which the movie was based was written by Nicholas Dawidoff and spent seven weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, which described the biography as “The life of Moe Berg, big-league catcher, O.S.S. agent, lady’s man, and freeloader.” If you like baseball and spy stories, this book and/or movie is for you.
Berg died on May 29, 1972, of an aortic aneurysm. His last words were a question to his nurse: “How are the Mets doing today?” He died before she could answer.
Matt Sieger, now retired sports reporter/columnist who worked for New York State and California newspapers, did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and received a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. This article first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on June 15, 2021.