Moe Berg
		Full Name: Morris Berg "The Catcher Was A Spy" Bats: Right Throws: Right Height: 6'1" Weight: 185 lbs. Born: Mar 02, 1902 in New York, NY Major League Debut: Jul 04, 1923 Died: May 29, 1972 in Belleville, NJ	CLICK FOR PHOTO GALLERY

CAREER STATISTICS - BATTING TOTALS

Berg was a catcher of average ability who played 15 years in the majors, in 1923 with the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers), and from 1926 through 1939 with four other teams: Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Nationals (Senators), and the Boston Red Sox. Moe graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law School and studied at the Sorbonne in France. He also spoke eight different languages fluently.

After his baseball career, he worked for the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) during World War II, but seldom talked about his ventures with that organization. He purportedly gathered intelligence on Germany's top scientists during that time. Following the war, he became something of a vagabound, with no obvious, regular employment. One writer said, "He was the most secretive man I ever met. In the press box, one minute, he'd be sitting next to you and conversing, and the next minute you'd turn around and he had disappeared without a word."

More information on Berg can be gleaned from a book written by Nicholas Dawidoff and published in 1994 by Pantheon Books. The book is titled, "The Catcher Was A Spy."

Among the most scholarly professional athletes ever, Berg was an alumnus of three universities, lawyer, mathematician, linguist, and poor hitter, eliciting the comment: "He can speak 12 languages but can't hit in any of them." His ability to handle young pitchers and his reputation as a bullpen mystic kept him in the majors, where his roommates wondered at his sacrosanct clutter of books and newspapers stacked in dozens of piles. He professed belief that his newspapers were "alive" and could "die" from being looked at by someone else. On occasion he braved snowstorms to purchase replacements for "deceased" newspapers.

Casey Stengel called him "the strangest man ever to play baseball" even before it was known he had served America as a spy. Some may have wondered why a third-string catcher like Berg went to Japan in the early 1930s with the likes of Ruth and Gehrig on an all-star traveling team. In fact, Berg was assigned to take espionage photos. During WWII, he became one of America's most important atomic spies, gathering vital information on top German scientists and even performing some missions that might have required assassination. He declined the Medal of Merit for his wartime service and never wrote his memoirs after being angered by an assigned co-author who confused him with "Moe" of the Three Stooges.

Berg fit the classic spy image: dark, heavy-featured, mysterious, sybaritic, courageous, and impeccably mannered. Women were attracted to the cultured, lifelong bachelor. 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 on the U.S. Supreme Court."