victor harris's Reviews > The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

Moe Berg may qualify as the most intriguing baseball player of all time. A weak-hitting but quality defensive catcher who kicked around with various teams for over a decade, the enigmatic Berg would make his mark on another front when he served as a spy for the OSS during WW II and for the CIA in the post-war. Unlike most ballplayers of the 20s-40s (or perhaps any era), he was a Princeton grad, had a law degree from Columbia, and was multi-lingual. He was also Jewish which made him somewhat of a rarity both in the baseball ranks and at exclusive clubby Princeton at the time.
A truly cosmopolitan figure, he was part of the famous 1930s baseball tour of Japan on a team which included the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. He was often popping up in forbidden places taking photos which he would later claim were used in American bombing missions. During the war, he roamed North Africa and Europe and was one of the agents responsible for locating German scientists involved in nuclear physics. Because he was conversant with science and had his language facility, he was regarded as a prized asset by the American intelligence community. Unfortunately, he had difficulty explaining his rather exorbitant expense accounts and in a pattern he would continue in the ensuing decades, he would often vanish and resurface with no accounting for his activities. These were indiscretions which would later irritate his overseers at the CIA who eventually would terminate his connection with the agency.
His mysterious lifestyle would be the focus of the author's narrative, sometimes to the point of tedium. The peripatetic Berg never held a regular full-time job after the war and basically existed on the largesse of sympathetic relatives and friends. His eccentricities and obsessions (always carrying a stack of newspapers and wearing the same style suits) and lack of romantic attachments made him even more compelling to a cast of admirers. Many of whom, as indicated, graciously subsidized his appetites and housing needs. It is with those encounters that an otherwise well-written book does flag a little as there are so many such episodes that a few examples would have been sufficient rather than a whole litany of such interactions. They almost all came to the same end, Berg would - for lack of a better word - mooch, then take offense over some trivial insult - real or imagined, and move on to the next benefactor.
This biography was written in the 1990s and overall is an enjoyable detour from the usual sports biography with a minor reduction in the rating for the reason cited.