Moe Berg, catcher who became a spy, gets an exhibit in Baseball Hall of Fame
Published September 7, 2018
Moe Berg posing as a catcher for the Washington Senators, Sept. 6, 1933. (Stanley Weston/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Moe Berg is going into the Baseball Hall of Fame – as a spy, not a catcher.
The shrine to the national pastime in Cooperstown, New York, recently opened an exhibit on the Jewish player, who gained more attention for his espionage than a 15-year career in which he finished with a batting average of .243 and six home runs.
Berg, following his baseball days in the 1920s and ’30s, worked for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS — a precursor to the CIA. He went on missions in then-Yugoslavia, where he tracked resistance groups, and Italy, where he interviewed physicists about the German nuclear program.
The Cooperstown exhibit, titled “Moe Berg: Big League Spy,” looks at his exploits in both worlds through baseball artifacts and wartime documents.
A New Yorker who spoke more than 10 languages (seven fluently) and graduated from Princeton, Berg was the subject of the film “The Catcher Was a Spy,” released in June. Jewish actor Paul Rudd portrayed Berg, who died in 1972 at 70.
