Dan Trefethen's Reviews > The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

The story of a baseball player turned spy sounds intriguing, but knowing many of the details left me underwhelmed.

Moe Berg was a flaneur, a polymath and autodidact, a bit of a con man, a very private person who was also exceedingly charming when he tried.

This was a man who worked just enough to get by, but never really excelled at anything. His greatest love appeared to be reading the newspapers and wandering through life unencumbered by family or friends (except when he called on them for a meal or lodging).

He was able to hang around in baseball for a long time because he was so personable, and it allowed him plenty of free time to do as he liked. The spy business in World War II was similar; the freewheeling nature of the OSS allowed Berg to saunter around Europe, finding out some things for the agency and living high off their expenses without worrying about financial accounting. It is intimated that Berg delivered some significant intelligence (he did get the Medal of Freedom), but what is described in the book isn't very impressive. While it has been suggested that Berg determined that the German atomic bomb program was a dud, he didn't really do that, as others had figured it out by the time they sent Berg to meet Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland in 1944. Berg had an opportunity to kill Heisenberg, but didn't since he didn't think Heisenberg could deliver a bomb. Anyhow, Berg wasn't really a killer and was uncomfortable with a gun.

As Berg's life was an odd mashup, so was this book. The first half is about baseball, the middle part about WWII espionage, and the last part about Berg's peripatetic life after the war. Baseball fans will like the first half, espionage fans will like the middle, but nobody will much care how Berg knocked around the country after the war.

This was probably a brilliant guy whose personality and basic laziness got in the way of his achieving anything significant. It's a tantalizing “what might have been” story, but ultimately doesn't carry the weight to justify a 350-page book.