Celebrating Jewish Icons: Moe Berg, baseball player and spy (Part 1)

Spies are supposed to be unassuming. They're supposed to be drab, harmless looking sorts who don't stand out, who blend right in.

Moe Berg was none of these things. Moe Berg, a Jewish boy who grew up in Harlem was tall, handsome, a professional athlete, and a fierce intellectual. Kids collected his playing card. Families would watch him dazzle quiz show hosts on TV. The papers would write about him.

And yet, in WWII, when the country needed a special man to find out exactly how close Hitler was to cracking the atom, Moe Berg answered the call.

Moe Berg might just be the smartest man to have ever run the bases for money.  Born in 1902 to a pair of Jewish immigrants, Moe proved to be a prodigy from a young age. According to the stories, he begged his parents to let him attend school when he was three and never slowed down from there. He studied voraciously and outpaced his peers by leaps and bounds earning himself a scholarship in the ivy league. 

Princeton was a dream come true for the Jewish son of a pharmacist from a rough neighbourhood, but it wasn't easy. While Moe excelled in his studies, he felt alienated by the culture of Princeton. No matter how high his grades, or what clubs he was involved in, he was always held at arms length by his peers. He might have been a genius, he might have been good looking and charming, but he was also a Jew, and at Princeton, that identity trumped whatever else he might have been.

Frustrated by prejudice, Moe flung himself into his studies. He took extra classes, spent hours in the library, scheduled office hours with professors in courses he wasn't taking. While he formally pursued an education in law, he ravenously learned everything he could on a wide variety of topics. By the time he graduated, he could hang in conversations about anthropology, the ancient Greeks, modern physics, and geopolitics and speak twelve languages. His knowledge had the breadth and quirkiness of a true autodidact. 

But his real passion was the diamond.

Moe played the game like few others of his time. A self-admitted weak hitter, he made up for his lack of plate presence with his speed, dexterity, and game sense. Moe would make plays nobody else could make, could see strategies his coaches missed. 

He distinguished himself in as captain for the Princeton ball team where he drew the attention of scouts from the Giants and the Robins. Despite seemingly heading for a career in academia or law, Moe signed a contract with the Robins and begin his career as a professional ballplayer.

Baseball in the 1920's was a chaotic, beautiful mess. Players traded teams and positions frequently, and Moe was no different. He played for several teams over the next few years in several positions. 

He first found success as a shortstop. In between the bases, he was an octopus, snagging balls out of the air and tagging runners like his arms were six feet long. But it was as a catcher where he would truly find his home on the field. As a catcher, he was a fortress, a play-making secret weapon. It was here, working in tandem with his pitchers, calling plays, and correctly reading the field that Moe was able to make his biggest impact. Of course, it also helped that he seemed to never drop the ball. Despite having to catch against Ted Lyon's famous knuckleball (a slippery little comet that was as unpredictable for catchers as it was for the batters it bedeviled), Moe held a record 177 games with no errors before finally breaking the streak in 1934.

His intellectual acumen and bizarre field presence made him a curiosity in the dugout. He'd be interviewed in the sports pages quoting literature and referencing mathematicians. A Dodgers scout once evaluated him with the now famous line, "Good field, no hit." But there was so much more to Moe than a simple breakdown of his batting average could say.

As a curious man, it was unsurprising that Moe jumped at the chance to travel overseas to Japan to teach the game in universities in 1932. Touring with a few fellow ballplayers, Moe didn't return with them when the contract with the universities expired. He stayed long after the job, using the trip as a chance to hit other spots -  Manchuria, Shanghai, Peking, Indochina, Siam, India, Egypt and a pre-war Berlin. When he later returned to Japan, he'd address the Japanese legislature in their native tongue and took footage of Tsukiji, Tokyo, and other cities(that according to some reports may or may not have  been used by the department of defense when planning actions in the Pacific).

He even appeared on Information, Please, a popular quiz show where he gave a dominating performance. A bit of stunt casting that back fired on the show's producers. They thought the idea of a ballplayer who thought he was smart was cute and would get some ratings, they didn't expect him to crush the trivia game like an intellectual juggernaut. Moe would appear on the show three times and emerge as one of the best competitors the show ever hosted and a fan favorite. 

But then, like the rest of the world, his life would change with the beginning of the war.

(Continued in part 2)