Moe Berg: From MLB Player to WWII Spy

By | July 6, 2018

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Catcher Moe Berg of the Washington Senators poses for a portrait on September 6, 1933 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Stanley Weston/Getty Images)

Morris “Moe” Berg enjoyed two exciting careers in his lifetime…first as a Major League Baseball player and then as a World War II spy. He earned the unofficial title of “the brainiest guy in baseball” and it was Berg’s superior intellect that got people’s attention, not his athletic ability. Berg was a nerd and a jock at the same time. Casey Stengel even described him as “the strangest man to ever play baseball.” So how did a mildly athletic brainiac end up immersed in wartime intrigue? 

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(MLB.com)

Baseball and Books

Moe Berg had a lifelong love of learning and even begged his mother to let him start school at age three and a half. When he was seven years old, he started playing baseball for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s baseball team even though he was Jewish, one of a long line of groups Berg belonged to where he was the odd-man out because of his religion. The next was the Barringer High School baseball team. After getting his diploma from Barringer, Berg attended New York University where he played on the college’s baseball team. After just one year, he transferred to Princeton University where he studied seven languages: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in modern languages. At both New York University and Princeton, Berg didn’t really fit in with his fellow classmates because he was one of just a few Jewish students.

He did find a place on the Princeton baseball team. He was a solid, smart player, which made up for his slow running and mediocre hitting. During his senior year, he communicated plays in Latin with his teammate Crossan Cooper, to confuse the opposing players.