BarcelonaCasey Stengel, one of the greatest coaches and managers in baseball history, said of Morris: “He’s the weirdest player who ever played baseball.” Moi Berg. And not without reason. When he was traveling with his team, he would buy all the local newspapers and read about ten each day. He carried books in classical Greek and won radio contests where he had to answer general knowledge questions. Moe Berg was such a different baseball player that he ended up playing spy and parachuting behind enemy lines during World War II.
Berg didn’t have a bad resume: baseball player and spy. The first part of the curriculum was public, the second only years later, when he was already retired. For 15 years he played well on the field. You can’t stay at the highest level for 15 years if you don’t have a track record, although he used to annoy coaches and managers by asking to be the last player to join the practice because he wanted to study. And the professors didn’t understand him either. What was a smart guy like him doing, wasting his life playing baseball? Berg responded by saying, “I’d rather be a player than a lawyer on the Supreme Court of the United States.” Basically, he did what he wanted. His teammates didn’t really understand him either, because it wasn’t normal for a player to graduate from Princeton. He was always reading, closed in on his world. It was like that when I was a child. There was no shortage of books in the house, as the father was a Jewish pharmacist from Ukraine who lived in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. A modest family, but where everyone went to the theater and read. The son came out unscathed. At the age of three, he already asked his mother to go to school: he wanted to learn everything.
When the Berg family moved to the Newark area, the young boy began playing baseball successfully. He was the perfect son: a top student and a good athlete. Thanks to his parents’ efforts and some scholarship money, he made it to Princeton, where he graduated. Great with praise In foreign languages. He studied seven: Latin, classical Greek, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Sanskrit. All this while playing on the college baseball team, with notable performances in victories over rivals Harvard and Yale. He was said to have sung his moves in Latin, to prevent his opponents from understanding them. In 1923, he received his first offers from professional baseball clubs. He signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were looking for Jewish players to attract the Jewish community to a stadium full of Irish and Italians. When the first season ended, he left with his first paycheck for Paris, where he lived in the Latin Quarter for a few months and enrolled in classes at the Sorbonne.
Since he wasn’t 100% focused on baseball, the coaches didn’t see him with good eyes, and he ended up playing a little bit for modest clubs like the Minneapolis Millers, the Toledo Mud Hens, or the Reading Keystones. However, in the latter team, he had a good year, which opened the doors to the Chicago White Sox, which he actually entered wrongly when he asked permission to arrive two months late each season, because he wanted to finish his law practice in Colombia. Of course, he always ended up on the bench, but a series of injuries worked in his favor and so he found himself playing Huntera situation where you don’t need to make a lot of physical effort but you need to have reflexes and be ready: ideal for Berg. Hunter He’s the guy in the mask behind the batter, ready to catch the ball with his glove, but also analyzing everything that happens on the field. He played for the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Senators in the last years of his career. In 1932, he agreed to spend two months in Japan teaching baseball to young college students, a trip he would repeat twice because he fell in love with Japanese culture. The first took him solo to China, Burma and India. The second, crossing the Soviet Union into Europe. When he returned to coaching, his teammates were on the beach with their families. He, on a train through China, read Sanskrit texts. He spent his last five years as a player with the Boston Red Sox, retiring in 1940 and remaining a coach. Then the United States entered the war.
Berg volunteered to fight, but with his resume he was sent to an office. At first his role in the war would be quite secondary, spending a year at bases in South America coordinating the health of the soldiers heading out. Far from the front, then. But Berg attracted attention when he showed his superiors the recordings he had made with a small film camera while living in Japan, now the enemy. In 1934 and 1935, he had climbed tall buildings, recorded ports and military bases… information that American bombers used to hit the Japanese. When they saw what kind of man he was, Berg was offered to become a spy and receive military training. The first assignment was to parachute into Yugoslavia to scout the terrain and make contact with resistance groups, such as Tito’s communists, to see if it made sense to cooperate with them. After that, for most of 1944, Berg traveled around Europe trying to convince German and Italian scientists to change their sides. He achieved this with Antonio Ferri, a rocket specialist. When US President Franklin Roosevelt heard that Berg had escaped punishment and returned home with Ferry, he sarcastically replied, “I see Berg is still playing well,” referring to his sporting past.
It was December 1944 when he received his most important assignment, when he was sent to Zurich, where the German scientist Werner Heisenberg was to give a lecture. His mission was clear: if he came to the conclusion that the Nazis were close to acquiring the atomic bomb, he was to kill Heisenberg, one of the leaders of the Nazi nuclear program. His superiors had given him a poison capsule that would end his life if it were discovered. He initially considered shooting Heisenberg on his way out of the talk he had attended. But he didn’t dare. At the subsequent dinner, Berg concluded that the Nazis were still far from their goal, as Heisenberg had come to say that the war was lost. So he didn’t kill him, although he had a second chance to do so, when he gained his confidence by going for a walk with him and pretending to be impressed. In reality, he was American, Jewish, and probably gay. All things the Nazis hated.
At the end of the war, Berg asked the CIA to send him to Israel, but to no avail. Instead, he was assigned to investigate the Soviet nuclear program, but after two years without achieving anything, he was dismissed. In fact, for the last twenty years of his life, no one ever knew what he lived on, because he had no job. He smiled, ironically, when asked. There are those who say that he remained a spy, and those who believe that he invested the money he earned so that he would never have to work again. Incidentally, once his exploits as a spy became known, a strange phenomenon occurred: his trading cards as a baseball player, which had never generated much interest, became a collector’s item. Years ago, they even made a film about his life.
