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Before the 1960s, baseball players were generally not the
brightest of athletes. Not to say they were stupid -- it's just that most of
them were signed by a major league club right out of high school (or even
before they graduated), so they were lacking in formal education.
A notable exception to that rule was Moe Berg,
whose 108th birthday we mark today. Berg was a catcher for seven major league
teams, and is generally considered the
smartest man who ever played baseball. He attended NYU and Princeton, graduating cum laude
in Modern Languages (studying Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin,
and Sanskrit -- the last two of which he spoke on the diamond to keep the
opposing team in the dark) and received a law degree from Columbia -- all
while playing baseball. In fact, he delayed his arrival at spring training at least twice in order to finish his LLB.
He was a mediocre hitter (a lifetime average of .273, with six home runs),
but his smarts and defensive ability allowed him to hang on in the majors for
15 seasons. He had a decent career, but wasn't a Hall of Famer, so why
are we celebrating him today? Ah, that's where the story gets interesting,
for we want to talk about his post-baseball career off the field.
Berg was, obviously, intellectually curious. He read ten newspapers a day,
studied at the Sorbonne,
and traveled widely throughout Asia, Europe, Russia, and the Americas. When
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Berg was ready to do his part to help win the
war by becoming a spy. The Army used movie footage he had secretly taken of
Tokyo in 1934 (while on a baseball goodwill tour) to help plan Jimmy Doolittle's 1942 air raid on the Japanese capital. Berg was then assigned to South
America to allegedly check on the welfare of American troops there, but his
real mission was to assess whether Latin American nations would pose a threat
to American security.
In 1943, Berg was assigned by the OSS (the spy agency that was the precursor to the CIA) to work secretly in Europe. He strategized with underground
troops in Yugoslavia to fight the Nazis, and was later moved to Italy, where
he helped kidnap and interrogate Italian scientists to determine how advanced
the German atomic bomb project was. For his actions, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, but he rejected it when he was told he couldn't reveal
why he'd earned it.
After the war, his life began to fall apart. The CIA hired him to investigate
the Soviet nuclear program in the 1950s, but he came up with nothing. Not having any
real training other than playing baseball and spying, he spent the last
decades of his life being mostly unemployed and living with relatives. He was
approached to write his memoirs in the '60s, but abandoned the project when
he realized his publisher thought he was Moe Howard
of the Three Stooges.
Despite his difficulties, he remained a baseball fan all his life, with his
last words being "How did the Mets do today?" (They won, beating the Cardinals, 7-6.)
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Wow. that's a sad story.
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