This Veterans Day Remember This Jewish Dodger

Fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers no doubt consider Freddie Freeman a hero for his MVP performance in the World Series. But with Veterans Day approaching, all Americans should take a moment to appreciate the valor of a former Dodger less well-known to today’s baseball aficionados — Moe Berg, a catcher who spied for the U.S. during World War II.

Morris Berg was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in a tenement on East 121st Street in Manhattan on March 2, 1902. At seven, demonstrating a passion for both the game and secret identities, he played for a Methodist Church team under the pseudonym Runt Wolfe. 

After graduating Barringer High School, Berg played shortstop for Princeton, where he majored in modern languages. He and another teammate would communicate on the field in Latin.

As Nicholas Dawidoff details in “The Catcher Was a Spy,” his definitive biography of Berg, after graduating magna cum laude in 1923, Berg was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers (known then as the Robins) and batted .186 in 49 games. St. Louis Cardinals scout Mike Gonzalez notoriously coined the phrase “good field, no hit” after watching him play.

Continuing to balance his intellectual and athletic interests he then spent the winter studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1926, as a student at Columbia Law School, he joined the White Sox and shifted to a catcher after the team’s first three options were injured. The move, and Berg’s enigmatic nature, were praised by legendary manager Casey Stengel, who remarked, “I call him the mystery catcher. Strangest fellah who ever put on a uniform.”

In 1929, Berg hit a career-high .288 in 106 games and received two votes in balloting for the American League’s Most Valuable Player. That was his hitting peak, however, and he retired after 15 years with a lifetime batting average of .243. One teammate quipped, “He can speak ten languages, but he can’t hit in any of them.”

In the meantime, however, Berg leveraged his athletic abilities in support of America. In 1934, while in Japan on a goodwill tour alongside all-star teammates Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Berg, who had learned Japanese, took home movies of the Tokyo skyline that were eventually used in General Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 bombing raids on the Japanese capital following the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Following his 1939 retirement as a player, Berg remained a committed patriot. He undertook an undercover assignment as a sports ambassador in Latin America under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs – a U.S. government agency dedicated to countering German and Italian propaganda efforts in Latin America. He parlayed that opportunity into a job as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, in 1943. 

At the OSS, his missions included posing as a businessman in Switzerland and being dropped behind enemy lines in Italy to make contact with an Italian atomic scientist. Also fluent in German, Berg was assigned to potentially assassinate the leading German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, in Zurich if Heisenberg indicated during a lecture there that Berlin was close to developing an atomic bomb. (Germany wasn’t, so Berg didn’t kill Heisenberg.)

At the OSS, his missions included posing as a businessman in Switzerland and being dropped behind enemy lines in Italy to make contact with an Italian atomic scientist. 

In 1945, Berg was selected to receive the Medal of Freedom, the top honor given to civilians during wartime, from President Harry S. Truman. The citation read: “Mr. Morris Berg, United States Civilian, rendered exceptionally meritorious service of high value to the war effort from April 1944 to January 1946. In a position of responsibility in the European Theater, he exhibited analytical abilities and a keen planning mind. He inspired both respect and constant high level of endeavor on the part of his subordinates which enabled his section to produce studies and analysis vital to the mounting of American operations.” 

Though Berg declined to accept the award, his sister later did, later donating it to the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

When his contract wasn’t renewed by the government, Berg struggled financially. In 1960, he agreed to write a book about his peripatetic life, but the project collapsed when the editor realized Berg was not Moe Howard from comedy troupe The Three Stooges. 

Berg’s dual passions for espionage and baseball remained unabated, however. In 1969, Dawidoff writes, Berg “probably” played a role in providing Israel with 100 military helicopters in an effort to aid an American ally, and might have met Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Three years later, minutes before he died at the age of 70 on May 29, 1972, he purportedly turned to a hospital nurse and with his last words asked: “How did the Mets do today?” They had won. Berg’s baseball card today is the only one on display in the CIA Museum.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”