| Moe Berg | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | |||||||||||||||
| Catcher | |||||||||||||||
| Born: March 2, 1902 New York City, U.S. | |||||||||||||||
| Died: May 29, 1972 (aged 70) Belleville, New Jersey, U.S. | |||||||||||||||
Batted: Right Threw: Right | |||||||||||||||
| MLB debut | |||||||||||||||
| June 27, 1923, for the Brooklyn Robins | |||||||||||||||
| Last MLB appearance | |||||||||||||||
| September 1, 1939, for the Boston Red Sox | |||||||||||||||
| MLB statistics | |||||||||||||||
| Batting average | .243 | ||||||||||||||
| Hits | 441 | ||||||||||||||
| Runs batted in | 206 | ||||||||||||||
| Stats at Baseball Reference | |||||||||||||||
| Teams | |||||||||||||||
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Morris Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American professional baseball catcher and coach in Major League Baseball who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, though he was never more than an average player and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball."[1] Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball."[2]
Berg was a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, spoke several languages, and regularly read ten newspapers a day. His reputation as an intellectual was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz show Information Please, in which he answered questions about the etymology of words and names from Greek and Latin, historical events in Europe and the Far East, and ongoing international conferences.[3]
As a spy working for the government of the United States, Berg traveled to Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on resistance groups which the U.S. government was considering supporting. He was sent on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed various physicists concerning the German nuclear weapons program. After the war, Berg was occasionally employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, successor to the Office of Strategic Services.
- ^ Dawidoff, p. 17
- ^ Berger, Ralph. "Moe Berg". The Baseball Biography Project. The Society for American Baseball Research. Archived from the original on August 13, 2012. Retrieved March 11, 2007.
- ^ Dawidoff, pp. 15–16.