The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Never a powerful hitter, at first Moe Berg was not even a particularly good one. He batted .235 as a sophomore, hit .230 the next year, and then, as a senior, he emerged as something special. His batting average was .337, and the more rigorous the competition, the better he played. In Princeton’s five games that year against Harvard and Yale, he batted .611, including hitting a ringing home run against the Elis. When Princeton pitcher Charlie Caldwell took on Holy Cross and the future Detroit Tigers righthanded pitcher Ownie Carroll, Berg doubled and scored the game’s only run, handing Carroll one of the two defeats he would suffer as a collegian. For one of the games against Harvard, Brooklyn Dodgers manager Wilbert Robinson sent his ace pitcher, the spitballer Burleigh Grimes, out to Princeton to look over a Princeton pitcher. Grimes returned to Brooklyn afterward to tell Robinson that the pitcher wasn’t much, but that the Tigers had some shortstop.

  Berg’s happiest moments at Princeton were on the baseball field. In addition to the actual play itself, he tutored teammates struggling with their studies and, with Crossan Cooper, the Princeton second baseman during Berg’s senior year, he devised a cunning system of communication. When an opposing runner was on second base, they disguised their intentions by yelling back and forth to each other in Latin. As he grew older, Berg was quick to tout baseball’s democratic charms. To him baseball was “the great leveller,” a green field in the spring where men of every height, breadth, shade, and creed were joined in harmonious competition. Skill and nothing else made you special. In this way as well, he resembled Robert Cohn. Success as a college athlete was crucial to both of them. Like Cohn, Berg found that sport helped him “to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

  During vacations Berg took odd jobs, like delivering mail. His most satisfying employment experience came in the summer of 1921, when he went north to Bristol, New Hampshire, to be a counselor at Camp Wah-Kee-Nah on Lake Newfound.

  Most of the boys at Wah-Kee-Nah were Jewish, and they adored their counselor, the Princeton shortstop—at least according to that counselor. “There isn’t a boy in this camp who doesn’t jump with glee to play ball with me and I make it a point to teach them something new every day,” Berg wrote to his father in July. Some of these lessons were imparted during the Sunday morning games Berg and the other counselors played against the children. “Every Sunday morning I hit one, a long one, out in the left field bushes for the edification of the boys,” he wrote. And then a sudden moment later, in the same letter, a fleeting moment of introspection unfurled like a breaker. “Pa,” he continued. “I’m surely enjoying this, probably mostly because it’s a novelty for me but mostly [sic] because it’s what I like most of all, the open country air with unprejudiced boys for real companions and none of the stiff-collar conventions or proprieties of the city and especially because I’m being paid for what is easy for me and appreciated.” The “city” was a euphemism. It was at Princeton where he’d met discrimination dressed up in a stiff collar.

  Happy as he said he was, to others Berg appeared a dour figure. Monroe Karasik, a camper when Berg worked at Wah-Kee-Nah, remembers that Berg was the only counselor who had an electric lamp installed over his bed. “The rumor was that he had to memorize Dante’s Divine Comedy,” says Karasik. “Most campers said that was kind of peculiar, because Moe rarely smiled.” Whether he was reading Dante or not, Berg was definitely studying Hebrew again. A Palestinian Ph.D. named Dr. Bassan was on hand at the camp, and Berg solicited lessons from him every day after lunch while the campers were having their rest period.

  Back at Princeton for his final year, he was more of a success than ever. In the classroom, he received his highest marks, and New Jersey sportswriters took note of his skill as a ballplayer. “Berg to Pass Out of Princeton This Week with Fine Record in Classes and Afield,” headlined the Newark News in a story that went on to applaud “one of the finest baseball careers in collegiate ranks.” On June 19, his graduation day, Berg was photographed seated at the Princeton sundial. Dressed in a well-cut suit, his trousers creased, shoes gleaming, and thick hair combed smooth, he had matured into a dashing man. But posed there at the sundial he looked glum. The truth was that Berg’s time at Princeton seemed to him to have been carpeted with rejection. He’d been voted neither baseball captain nor into Phi Beta Kappa, two honors that he might well have felt he merited. His marginal standing amidst his peers was reinforced for him one more time with the publication of “The Class and Its Opinions,” a collection of senior plaudits. Berg received 2 votes for “Most Brilliant” (the winner had 37), and not a single tally in any of the 41 other categories, among them “Best Ail-Around Athlete,” “Most Scholarly,” and, predictably, “Most Representative Princetonian.”

  While no student in the Class of 1923 thought Berg “Most Likely to Succeed,” his professors were more optimistic. On June 26, despite a Berg single and double in four at bats to complement several marvelous plays at shortstop, Yale beat Princeton 5–1 at Yankee Stadium to win the Big Three title. Princeton finished the season 21–4. The next day Edmund Robbins, Berg’s classics professor, addressed a brief note to him, which concluded, “I congratulate you on the [baseball] record you made—and your record in scholarship as well. You have had the finest spirit that Princeton can show—all the time—and I am proud of you.” The modern languages department did that one better, offering him a teaching post. Berg thought not. He intended, eventually, to go to law school, his father’s wish, but first, what he really hoped to do was to spend some time in the places where people spoke those many languages he’d been learning. He was best at French, and wanted badly to see Paris, Versailles, and Provence. It would cost money to cross the ocean and enroll in a foreign university but, fortunately, a high-salaried summer job was waiting for him in Brooklyn.

  IN 1923, NEW York City’s two National League baseball franchises were both managed by those illustrious former teammates of Princeton coach Clarke. John McGraw of the New York Giants and Wilbert Robinson of the Brooklyn Robins (soon to be called the Dodgers) both knew all about Berg, and both wanted him. They liked his elegant play at shortstop, and they liked his blood. New York City had a huge Jewish population, and the team that could sign on a talented Jewish ballplayer would have quite a drawing card on its hands.

  McGraw was especially keen. Despite being a first-place team on its way toward winning the National League pennant, the Giants weren’t selling tickets. Attendance at the Polo Grounds was off 130,000 from the previous season. The shrewd manager began confiding his efforts to “land a prospect of Jewish blood” to reporters. But McGraw, nicknamed “Little Napoleon,” was a domineering, abrasive man. Robinson was the opposite, a jolly, rubicund sort known generally as “Uncle Robbie.” Robinson had one more thing besides temperament going for him in Berg’s mind: a mediocre team. Berg wanted to play, and he thought the Robins would give him the chance sooner. Brooklyn was thin at shortstop, while McGraw had two future Hall of Famers at the position, Dave “Beauty” Bancroft, the veteran team captain, and Travis Jackson, lean, quick, and a year younger than Berg.

  Berg was hesitant. Perhaps he ought to listen to his father, dispense with games, and begin law school. But he loved baseball. Berg had met Dutch Carter, a former Yale pitcher who spurned the big leagues for law school, and it was Carter who made up his mind for him. “Take the baseball career,” Carter advised. “The law can wait. When I was your age, I had a chance to pitch in the National League. But my family looked down on professional sports and vehemently opposed my accepting. I’ve always been sorry I listened to them, because it’s made me a frustrated man. Don’t you become frustrated. At least give it a try.”

  On June 27, the day after his heroics at Yankee Stadium, Berg exchanged his orange and black Princeton jersey and knickers for the blue and white flannel of Brooklyn. “The check they offered me for signing [$5,000] wasn’t hard to take,” Berg would say years later. For three months’ work, the check w
as his independence. The money bought him his first trip abroad, and it let him postpone decisions about his career.

  During his life Berg would go back to Princeton at frequent intervals to visit friends in the science community, to read books and newspapers in Firestone Library, and to watch football games. He never once attended a Class of 1923 reunion, but as an old man, he did like to settle himself under the afternoon sun in the bleachers during varsity baseball practice. Sometimes the players would invite him out for a meal afterward, and he would go, gladly, and regale them with baseball stories. Some of the younger players thought he sounded wistful.

  4

  Robin in Paris

  On June 27, 1923, Brooklyn’s newspapers were full of booze, betrayal, and Berg. Thousands of block parties in Brooklyn and Queens were exposed as “Carnivals at which bootleggers and gamblers reap a rich harvest and the morals of young girls put in peril.” Mrs. Gladys Miller, a “Former Long Island Society Girl,” was granted a divorce from her husband, who maintained a “Love Nest” near their home. And Moe Berg became a major league baseball player. “Brooklyn Club Signs Moe Berg” was the banner headline in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The Brooklyn Citizen was more subdued, with its one-column introduction: “Shortstop Berg of Princeton Joins Robins.”

  Berg had signed his Brooklyn contract at Yankee Stadium following the Yale game and then spent the night in a New York hotel. The next morning he took the team train to Philadelphia, where the Robins had an afternoon game at the Baker Bowl against the Phillies. He checked into the Lorraine Hotel in the morning, worked out at shortstop after lunch, played three fine innings behind Dutch Ruether in Brooklyn’s 15–5 victory in the late afternoon, and was fodder for the headline writers by nightfall. “Moe Berg Impresses as Superbas Swamp Phils,” cried the Eagle. The Citizen, casting aside discretion, crowed, “Berg, Rah Rah Boy, Shows Real Class in Big League Debut.”

  With Brooklyn ahead 13–4 in the seventh inning, Robinson had decided to have a look at the college boy. Berg handled five chances flawlessly in his debut, including snaring Cy Williams’s ninth-inning line drive, which he converted into a game-ending double play. At bat, although “plainly a little nervous” and handicapped by “a false shoulder movement,” to the eyes of Eagle correspondent Thomas Rice, Berg managed to scratch a bouncing single up the middle past pitcher Clarence Mitchell and later scored in the eighth inning. In assessing Berg, Rice observed “that like many other baseball performers, and some of them the best, he is more agile than fast. He can bob around quickly in scooting after wide hit balls, but is rather a slow runner on the bases.”

  For his part, Berg told reporters that he had yet to decide upon a career, that he hoped to study abroad after the season, and that life with the Robins was “a good way to accumulate jack” toward tuition. “He has noted the number of college balltossers, stars on collegiate fields, who have joined big league camps only to warm the bench for a long while and then start through minor circuits,” explained a Newark News reporter who had covered Berg at Princeton. “That is not to be his lot, he says. He will make good with Brooklyn or he will make his exit from the professional game.” Berg’s caution was prudent. Robinson wouldn’t make him the regular Brooklyn shortstop until August, when the Robins were far out of pennant contention.

  As the weeks stretched deep into July, most people, including John McGraw, forgot all about Berg. On July 27, the Jewish Tribune reported that the Giants manager was offering $100,000 for a good Jewish player. Musing on the subject, McGraw said, “Right at the moment, [Sammy] Bohne is the only Jew I can recall in either major league.” McGraw revealed his theories on the paucity of Jews in the big leagues: “The parents … influence them not to let anything interfere with their mental training for the future,” and cited the Jewish “love of combat” as his reason for dangling such a princely sum. The truth of it, of course, was in the declining attendance.

  Although Brooklyn was 35 percent Jewish by 1927, Berg’s presence on the Superbas roster did not send charges of excitation through Williamsburg, Brownsville, Bensonhurst, or the borough’s other Jewish neighborhoods, probably because Robinson made no real effort to hype the rookie shortstop’s religion. He may have sensed that Berg was touchy about his faith. During his long baseball career, Berg’s reticence in regard to religion and the fact that he never played very much or very well usually kept the Jewish paparazzi at bay. Beyond this, something about Berg’s manner held even zealots at a distance.

  With Brooklyn wallowing in the National League’s second division, Berg started a handful of games in August and September, pleasing his mother, who exulted over the progress of her son the ballplayer. “Oh, she loved it, she loved it,” Sam Berg recalled years later. Throughout Berg’s career, Rose would consult national weather forecasts in the newspaper. “Oh,” she might say, “it’s raining in Chicago.” Relatives soon recognized that this meant Moe was scheduled to play a game that day in Chicago and Rose was worried that it would be postponed. On game days in Brooklyn, Rose gathered up friends and family members with the cry “Moe is playing with the Robins and we have to go!” Bernard always stayed home, and the Brooklyn baseball cognoscenti were likewise unimpressed. “I don’t think he was much of a shortstop,” says Charlie Segar, then a young baseball writer for the Citizen. No, he wasn’t. Berg was slow afoot, increasingly erratic with his throws, and overmatched as a hitter.

  The poor throwing put him in headlines for the third and final time that summer, on August 17, when the Eagle fretted, “Berg Worried Over Queer Twist He Gets on Throw; Curving of Ball a Mystery.” His throws, it seemed, veered and dipped suddenly, the way a pitcher’s slider does. Rice, of the Eagle, explained that “Berg is essentially an overhand thrower, and he has a wonderful arm. Uncle Wilbert Robinson says it is one of the best arms he ever saw and it is certainly one of the best the present writer ever saw. He gets the ball away faster than most overhand throwers, his aim is true and his speed terrific, but in some unknown way he gives the ball a twist which interferes with his effectiveness.”

  Berg did play well in a September 17 loss to the Philadelphia Athletics. He had two hits in four times at bat and fielded ten chances at shortstop without incident. Unfortunately, the Athletics were an American League team and the game was an exhibition, so it didn’t count. More typical was August 17, when Berg was 0–3 with an error. In all, Berg had played in 47 games for Brooklyn, batted .186, and made 22 errors. It was time to get out of town, and that’s what he did. In early October, Berg left for Paris.

  MOE BERG WAS an innocent on his first trip abroad, and what else could he have been? Thus far his compass had spread narrow; he had studied, he had played, but he hadn’t lived. Now he was bound for postwar Paris, and the Left Bank at that, where ideas fresh and strange dusted the air like pollen.

  When he sailed from New York, Berg hadn’t been sure whether to enroll at a university in Paris or somewhere in Provence. Language study was his main concern, and the less than lilting varieties of provincial patois he heard aboard ship predisposed him toward the capital. He was certain as soon as he saw it. Within a week of his arrival in Paris, he had looked over the Sorbonne, found an apartment in the Latin Quarter, and written to his family, “I am settled, registered, and the happiest one in the universe.”

  France delighted him for the sheer difference of it all. Hot chocolate, private train compartments, seatless toilets, the book stalls along the Seine—quotidian Paris was a blissfully enervating experience for Berg. His French, he immediately discovered, “was fine,” and it took him everywhere. Just to “walk for several hours,” he told his family, “was exhilarating.” He wandered through the Tuileries, the Louvre, and the sprawling produce market at Les Halles, stepped into a Mass at Notre-Dame—“I go in like I’m going to a show,” he wrote, drank beer in cafés, spent the obligatory evening at the Folies-Bergère, and went to the theater as often as he could, developing a taste for Racine and Molière. “No matter how national, prejudiced, and so
forth a people may be, there is a culture that stands out and above it all and to me the French is by far the greatest in all fields,” he wrote to his parents after a month in Paris.

  On one of his walks along the Boulevard des Italiens, in front of the Opéra, he encountered John McGraw, vacationing with Giants coach Hughie Jennings. McGraw remembered Berg, and the three Americans fell into one another’s arms. McGraw had lost his way, so Berg directed him back to his hotel, the Continental. The Giants manager insisted that Berg join him for dinner that night, but Berg had a theater ticket, so they made a date for another evening. “John McGraw said a few things to me which I better tell after I eat with them,” Berg wrote cryptically to his family. They did dine, and Berg came away triumphant. First he had a highball with Jennings, which tasted to him “like Berg’s special mixture for constipation.” The drink was on Jennings, who had a law degree from Cornell, but not much French. He ordered anyway and, in the Continental tradition, the bartender made him pay for his broken phrases, prompting Berg to gloat in a letter home, “They charged him plenty—as they do all English-speaking peoples here but of course our boy doesn’t come in there.”

  During the meal, McGraw asked Berg why he hadn’t joined the Giants the previous summer, and after Berg replied with something modest, McGraw flattered him further, telling him that he was young and full of promise. “He is a most encouraging fellow—just as glad as could be to see me,” Berg told his family. The visit also made an impression upon McGraw. Back in New York, he told an AP reporter all about it, exclaiming, “Who ever heard of a ballplayer spending his vacation studying Latin—and in Paris?”