Catcher in the Reich

By R.Z. Shepard

MOE BERG: ATHLETE, SCHOLAR, SPY by LOUIS KAUFMAN, BARBARA FITZGERALD and TOM SEWELL 274 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

In the fall of 1934, as members of America's touring all-star baseball team arrived at Tokyo Station, crowds of Japanese fans began to cheer: "Banzai, Babe Ruth! Banzai, Lou Gehrig! Banzai, Jimmy Foxx! . . . Banzai, Moe Berg!"

Moe Berg?

It is astonishing that in a sport whose devoted followers can recall such trivia as Fenton Mole's lifetime batting average, the name Moe Berg seems all but forgotten. Casey Stengel called him "the strangest fellah who ever put on a uniform." The strange thing was that Berg played major league baseball at all. Unlike Stengel, who it is said became a ballplayer after discovering that he was a lefthanded dentistry student in a world of righthanded dental equipment, Berg was suited to do just about anything. He had an IQ that could not have been too far behind his career batting average of 243. He was competent in a dozen languages, including Latin and Sanskrit. He held a law degree and even practiced for a few off-seasons on Wall Street. He was charming, good-looking, witty and a connoisseur of wine, women and string quartets. He kept a tuxedo in his locker. He was also a bit mysterious.

A-Bomb Race. Just how mysterious is now told in this biography, which claims that Moe Berg was not only the smartest man who ever wore spikes but also the U.S.'s most important atomic spy during World War II. Working for OSS in Switzerland and behind enemy lines, Berg gathered information that determined Germany's progress toward building a nuclear bomb. He was also able to learn the whereabouts of labs and reactors and the identities of Hitler's leading atomic scientists. The authors raise the possibility that Berg may even have assassinated a few, and that he had orders to kill Werner Heisenberg during a lecture visit to Switzerland if the great German physicist was discovered to be participating in Hitler's A-bomb race.

Berg never spoke of his spy experiences to friends or relatives, and he refused to detail his OSS missions even for Government records. His secrets were probably lost forever when, inMay 1972, Berg died at the age of 70 from injuries suffered in a fall at his bachelor apartment in Newark, N.J.

Berg grew up in that city, the son of an immigrant Russian Jewish pharmacist. At Princeton, he excelled in romance languages and stopping balls as the varsity shortstop. Berg lacked confidence that he could make it in the majors, but he reasoned that baseball was the most enjoyable way to earn enough money to study phonetics at the Sorbonne. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who probably thought Berg had said something about liking sour buns, offered him a $5,000 contract.

As a rookie in 1923, Berg proved to be a great glove, a slow runner and a weak bat. The standard line on Moe was that he could speak many languages but couldn't hit in any of them. But as a catcher with the Chicago White Sox and later with the Boston Red Sox, he made a place for himself in the major leagues. "I spent years attempting to master a number of foreign languages," he said, "and what happens? I turn out to be a catcher and am reduced to sign language on the ballfield."

No catcher ever wore the tools of ignorance more ironically. At times Berg's knowledge seemed inexhaustible. He once got a lost busload of players to the game by celestial navigation. In 1938 he hit 1.000 as a guest panelist on the radio quiz show Information Please. Yet he shared rather than flaunted his learning. Arthur Daley, the late New York Times sports columnist, recalled that his friendship with Berg began when the catcher gently corrected his pronunciation of "facade." For reasons best known to sportswriters, Daley had said "facard."

Doolittle Raid. Berg's personal habits were also fastidious. Off the field he always wore black suits, white shirts and black ties. His dark hair was always plastered in place. His relationship with newspapers seems to have been practically fetishistic. He bought domestic and foreign dailies regularly and would not read a paper if it had been read by anyone else. "Don't touch, don't touch, they're alive," he told visitors. "After I've read them, they'll be dead, and then you may have them."

Berg, it appears, was driven not by one but two demons: a desire for academic excellence rooted in the bookish traditions of his family, and a love for baseball endemic to an American boyhood. To become a college professor or a lawyer must not have been much of a challenge to Berg. But to enter the American mainstream as a professional athlete, and later as a member of an elite espionage unit, must have been a wild dream come true. His life as a spy was unsuspected until a few years after his 1934 Japan tour when he asked Pitcher Lefty Gomez to send any snapshots he had taken in Tokyo on to Washington. The pictures that Berg himself had taken were used in the Doolittle raid. In addition to his World War II spying, he was also active in getting to German scientists before the Russians did. After the war he was a CIA consultant on satellite science but spent most of his time filling what few gaps were left in his language studies.

Given the nature of Moe Berg's secret life and modest personality, it is not surprising that this biography is strong on color but a little patchy in form and substance. Yet the book is an incontestably fascinating resurrection of a true major leaguer--a man who defied the law of levity as laid down by Ring Lardner and enforced by generations of sportswriters who believed that with the exception of spitball pitchers, a baseball player ceased to be interesting from the neck up. R.Z. Sheppard

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