That wasn’t all Berg was studying. For the 32 francs, 50 centimes ($1.95) tuition fee, he received a card entitling him to attend as many courses as he wished. “I don’t let a thing go by,” he informed his family, and this was little exaggeration. His workload included five history courses, including a survey of seventeenth-century France—“which, if it becomes too one-sided, I’ll tell the professor to stick the course up his !!!”; eight classes in French and Romanic linguistics; five classes in French literature; one in the history of Italian literature; another in the history of Latin literature; comic drama; and a study of Latin during the Middle Ages. In all, he was taking twenty-two classes.
He liked to tinker with words, to know where they came from, how they’d evolved into the present spelling, pronunciation, and usage, and so philology interested him most of all. “Naturally the ideal language would be a combination of the Teutonic and Latinic elements and that’s what English is,” he informed his father, who, no doubt, agreed. Scrutinizing language lent him a forkful of humility, too. “No matter how well a foreigner speaks French, he remains a foreigner, that is, as far as the little nuances of speech are concerned,” he reflected in mid-January.
Berg’s professor of phonetics was the famous L’Abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot, the founder of modern experimental phonetics. Not many students were interested in the subject, so Berg received personal instruction. He also spent hours in the language laboratory, analyzing his own speech patterns, and he had a pleasant conversation with a doctoral student who was preparing a thesis on the American “r.”
That was as close as Berg came to mentioning a friend. For all his enthusiasm for his surroundings, Berg was a loner in Paris, much as he’d been at Princeton. Diffident by nature, he could also sound intolerant—not a promising combination for striking up warm acquaintances. At various times he referred to the French as “nickel-squeezers” and claimed Frenchmen grew whiskers to “hide their dirty faces.” Describing an evening out, he wrote, “A nigger is the same as a brother to a Frenchman—the other night a beautiful French woman sat next to me at the theater and on her left her husband, I guess, a dirty black nigger—if some of our Southern whites ever saw that, there’d be a riot.” Libertine Paris likewise left him disgusted. “The women have the nerve to rule the streets here,” he complained in one letter. “The French musical comedy stage is obscene, the women at times are absolutely naked,” he huffed prudishly in another. As to the women he met, he struck a condescending tone. “I have been accosted many times; I always talk to them and send them away laughing.” Clearly, there were a lot of experiments he wasn’t ready for.
It went beyond a matter of maturity. That a man of such expansive academic curiosity was otherwise prone to the rigid, timid thinking of one of Sinclair Lewis’s Gopher Prairie feed merchants was surprising. Berg’s pleasures were not much different from those of the average tourist, while a fluttering feminine eyelash sent him stumbling into retreat, and the movable feast of painting, writing, and music that made Paris in 1923–24 the capital of the avant-garde he noticed not at all. True, he was young, only twenty-one, and since he was precocious in so many ways, perhaps it was to be expected that other things would come more slowly. Yet Berg in Paris as a recent college graduate really was not that different from the Berg who would return to the city twenty years later as a spy. If he was prepared for something, had been told what to look for, was carrying instructions, he was fine, even creative. Without guidance from a textbook, or a teacher, or a coach, or a parent, or a general, however, he grew confused and retreated.
The cumulative effect at the moment was that, even with the staggering number of courses he’d taken on, Berg had time on his hands. To fill it, he developed a habit he’d keep for the rest of his days: multiple newspapers. Paris was full of newspapers, and Berg read all he could get his hands on. Days began and ended in respectability with L’Oeuvre each morning and Le Temps in the evening. In between, he read Journal des débats and Le Figaro, whose political coverage he admired; L’Action française and Le Gaulois for the royalist perspective; Echo de Paris to get the Catholic side of things; Le Libertaire and L’Humanité to hear what the anarchists were foaming about. Hidden at the center of the bundle he hauled back to his apartment were the scandal sheets or, as he put it, “a flock of papers for the rabble.” He was a careful reader, particularly when it came to international politics. Consistent with his burgeoning interest in linguistics, he kept a written list of the English words that appeared in French papers.
By January, he was missing baseball. “Well, pretty soon the bell will ring again to hit the old apple and believe me I’m anxious to show all the gents that I can do it and have enough confidence in myself to believe that I’ll give ’em all a good battle,” he wrote, slipping easily into the diamond jargon. Yet Berg didn’t hurry back to New York to get himself into shape so that he could prove to Uncle Robby that he belonged in the major leagues. Instead, he toured Italy and Switzerland, and that indulgence quickly cost him.
5
Good Field,
No Hit
Joe Cascarella was one of Moe Berg’s teammates for the Boston Red Sox for portions of the 1935 and 1936 seasons. Cascarella was a pitcher who seldom pitched, and Berg was a reserve catcher who rarely caught, so they spent many afternoons together in the bull pen, watching their teammates do the playing. Whatever dash Cascarella’s fastball was lacking, he wasn’t missing personally. “Crooning Joe” liked stylish clothes, and had once been hired to sing on a Philadelphia radio show. Berg bewildered him. “It was very puzzling,” he says. “Here was this man with a tremendous academic background in a game that didn’t call for it. I asked this to myself numerous times: why would he select the ordinary game of baseball and devote so much time to it?”
Moe Berg wore a professional baseball uniform for nineteen years, more than a quarter of his life, and far longer than most men last in the game. He was many things ballplayers are not supposed to be: educated, intelligent, cosmopolitan, well spoken, Jewish, and slow-footed. He didn’t hit many home runs either, only six as a major leaguer. His lifetime batting average was a feeble .243. It seemed odd that a man of such parts should have remained committed to something that freighted him with mediocrity.
Cascarella never asked Berg about his reasons for staying in baseball, but Diane Roberts did. In 1933, Roberts was a lithe young woman of twenty-two, living alone at the Wardman Park, a residential hotel in Washington. Huey Long, Henry Wallace, and Joseph Kennedy all kept apartments at the Wardman Park at the time, as did several members of the Washington Senators baseball team, including Moe Berg. Some of the Senators would spend their evenings together in rocking chairs on the hotel porch, ogling energetically when someone like Roberts passed. Berg didn’t do this. As a consequence, alone among the Senators, he became Roberts’s friend. “His manners were very good,” she says. “He was very polite. He wasn’t in the same class as those guys sitting in chairs as a gang, whistling at girls. He told me about going to Princeton and Columbia law school. He said he wanted to be an international lawyer. I said, ‘Why do you play baseball?’ He said, ‘I love it. I could never stop.’ ”
He did love it then, as he always had. Yet, over nineteen seasons, it was an affection that evolved, the way some marriages do, from passion to comfort. Baseball served Moe Berg well. After a time it afforded him a lifestyle that he liked, and offered him a center that he needed. He, in turn, was a far more useful player than might be supposed. For a time, it even appeared that he would become one of the best of his day.
AS BERG SAILED home from Europe in the late winter of 1924, the Newark News was busy keeping baseball in perspective for him. “He likes to succeed,” the paper said, “but he will not make the mistake of many a collegian who has gone into professional sport and been mired in the life when he found he was only a second-class player. Berg seems too wise for that, his friends agree.” Perhaps. Berg docked in New York, freshened his valise in Newark, and boug
ht a seat on the Florida Flier, bound for the Robins training camp in Clearwater. Robinson watched Berg practice, saw that Paris had seasoned his French but had lent no brio to his hitting, and optioned him to the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association. Berg took the demotion poorly. He muttered something about becoming an instructor of foreign languages, announced that he was going home to Newark, and bought himself a railroad ticket. Long train rides can be wonderfully conducive to reconsidering. In Newark, Berg asked that his mail be forwarded to Minneapolis. It was spring. Nobody hired teachers in the spring. Besides, most ballplayers spent some time in the minors.
Berg joined the Millers in mid-April. His tardy appearance and the fact that the team was well larded with infielders kept him waiting until June before he was given a turn as the regular Minneapolis third baseman. He started well, batting close to .330 through the month, and found himself enjoying the ballplayer’s life. On an off day during a series in Milwaukee, he and teammate Pat Malone—destined to become a fine pitcher for the Chicago Cubs—took a train south to Chicago, where they saw the Red Sox play the White Sox. Afterward, they went for a walk, looking over the city and listening to animated talk about Leopold and Loeb, young homosexual scions of wealthy Chicago families who were accused of murdering a fourteen-year-old boy and stuffing his corpse into a railway culvert. “Perverts,” Berg called the defendants in a letter home, in which he went on to lump them with the “inactive college type” he’d seen at Princeton who read “perverted literature like Oscar Wilde and the Renaissance Italians and thereby take free license to copy them. The student in athletics,” he advised, pointedly, “is also the healthier minded.”
Through July Berg’s batting average plummeted, and soon he was back on the bench, where he remained mired, more or less, until August 19, when he was loaned to the Toledo Mud Hens for the remainder of the season.
Unfortunately for the baseball-mad citizens of Toledo, the 1924 Mud Hens were a lavishly bad team. The infielders were so ravaged by injuries that John Schulte, a catcher, had been pressed into duty at second base. At shortstop was Rabbit Helgeth, whose erratic fielding matched his random behavior. As Berg arrived on the scene, the team fined Helgeth $10 for poor play. He refused to pay, and was suspended, and Berg had a starting job.
Soon there was joy in Toledo. In an article headlined “Why the Mud Hens Are Playing Better Ball Now,” the News-Bee writer explained that “Moe Berg is not a great shortstop, and he has his bad moments, but he is such a great improvement over Helgeth that he has restored confidence among the Toledo players and they are now able to go through a game without the fear that the hole in the shortfield would eventually prove their undoing.”
Berg’s worst moments continued to be as a hitter. After watching him play early in his career, the major league scout Mike Gonzalez filed a brief, remorseless dispatch that was such a true description of Berg, and a thousand ballplayers like him, that it made Gonzalez famous. “Good field, no hit” is what he wrote, and Berg’s batting in Ohio—his average was a bruised .264 by season’s end—was meek argument to the contrary.
Home for the winter, Berg took classes in French and Spanish at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and reviewed Dr. John Gordon Andison’s The Affirmative Particles in French for the spring issue of the Romanic Review. Berg evaluated the author’s “detailed account of oui,” on etymological, phonological, and morphological grounds, and concluded that while “the author advances no new theory … this thesis is a distinct contribution to the bibliography of Romance linguistics.” By the time his essay was published in April 1925, Berg was in Reading, Pennsylvania, making a distinct contribution of his own. They called him “the Great Moe” in Reading, where the word on whether this Berg fellow was a major league prospect was a resounding yes.
International League baseball had been in Reading since 1919, and the German farmers, cigar makers, beer brewers, and pretzel bakers of Berks County had yet to see a home team worth taking the afternoon off for. They got one with the 1925 Keystones, and in Berg local newspapermen had a player on whom they could spread praise thick as honey over butter. By early June he had been called everything from “a revelation” to “the whole show” to “the brilliant young shortstop.” The difference was his hitting. Except for a mild slump in August, he bashed the ball around Lauer’s Park with authority. On May 11, he had two home runs and a double against Syracuse. Eight days later his fifth hit of the game, a triple, defeated Jersey City. Soon the Reading Eagle reported that Berg “has been pickling the horsehide over the .300 mark all year and his sudden rise to batting power might chase the idea that he can’t hit in the majors.”
He played like a man of urgent appetites, with everything, both successes and failures, coming frequently and in profusion. On a sweltering June afternoon in Providence he made four errors, but slapped out as many hits, in an 8–5 victory. In June, the Eagle despaired over “a disastrous afternoon at shortstop,” in which Berg errors cost his team eight runs. Come July, the Baltimore News baseball writer Roger Pippen was calling Berg and Keystones second baseman Heinie Scheer “the best double-play artists in the league.”
The Keys reached second place on June 20 for the first time in franchise history, with Berg’s batting average gliding close to .340 by late July. He hit three home runs in three days to close the month, before the slump cooled him off. The Keys stumbled with him, to fifth place, where they remained, for their highest finish ever. There was more verve left in Berg. On September 20 he had eight hits in eight at bats in a doubleheader against Providence. Nobody in the International League had ever done that. The Chicago Cubs offered Reading $25,000 for him. Chicago’s South Side franchise, the White Sox, however, had earlier contracted with Reading for a $6,000 option on Berg, which they exercised. Berg finished the season with a .311 batting average, 124 runs batted in, and, more sobering, 72 errors. Then he hurried out of town. He was late for law school.
IN 1920, THE outrage over the infamous 1919 Black Sox World Series gambling scandal had purged the White Sox of charismatic stars like “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Bucky “Ginger Kid” Weaver, and without them the team’s fortunes had sagged like worn bed ticking. By 1926, the roster was thin and management decisions seemed doomed to disaster—a prevailing discontent around Chicago which White Sox owner Charles Comiskey’s latest elixir, his new shortstop, Moe Berg, would do nothing to appease. In early March, Berg announced that, instead of seizing this opportunity to rejoin the major leagues, he had decided to skip spring training and the first two months of the season to complete his first year of law school.
This was such an unusual choice that the White Sox had dismissed it when Berg advised them of his intentions during the previous August in Reading. They took him more seriously in late February, when each member of the throng of White Sox officials who visited New York in hopes of luring him out of the classroom was stoutly rebuffed. The White Sox star second baseman and manager, Eddie Collins, a former Columbia undergraduate himself, caused a stir when he visited his old campus to plead with Berg. Collins told him that to improve at baseball, he needed to play. “And what would I do if I broke my leg?” Berg retorted. Collins found that difficult to parry. He said he’d see Berg in June. “It was quite a disappointment to Manager Collins, who had counted upon Berg to handle the shortstop job when the season opens,” said the Chicago Tribune article. Berg “was intent upon being an attorney and wants to finish his law education now so he can practice to some extent in the winter time while he is playing and then have an established profession when the time comes that he must quit the game.”
Berg explained his motivations in a letter to Asa Bushnell, a Princeton alumni coordinator. “I have always considered the game only as a means to an end, because of its uncertainty, and the means are very important to me at this stage of life,” he wrote. “It was a faster and more enjoyable way than any other to enable myself to finish my academic education and now a profession.”
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br /> The demotion from Brooklyn to Minneapolis must have shaken Berg. Bernard Berg had long pressured him, the most talented of his three children, to attend law school and become a professional. It’s entirely possible that before Berg left for Minneapolis, he brokered a compromise with his father. He’d continue to play baseball, but not at the expense of his education. Still, it was a curious time to undermine his chances in baseball. The fact was that, if he did break a leg, he could then study law. A job as a starting major league shortstop was an elusive prize, and for a man who liked the sport as much as Berg did, it was an odd decision.
Berg joined the White Sox on May 28. In his absence the team had signed Bill Hunnefield to play shortstop, and for much of the summer “Honey Boy” was a .300 hitter and Moe Berg a flannel-clad spectator. He was also a target for the japes of a Chicago press that had been annoyed by his law school decision. Mocking comments alluded to how rarely he played. When he was in the lineup, accounts of his spotty hitting and fielding tended to be gratuitously snide. In a game against Saint Louis, which the White Sox “lost because of the one error they made … our aspiring barrister Moe Berg was guilty of the mistake. He could never convince any jury of laymen that it wasn’t his fault.” In all, he earned the year’s tuition money by playing in 41 games and hitting .221. His one moment of triumph came in the City Series, a best of seven post-season competition with the Cubs. In the seventh game, Berg’s double off the left field wall at Wrigley Field drove in the series-winning run for the White Sox. “Moe Berg isn’t much of a hitter, but this was a game where a decorum meant over $300 per individual, so Moe hit one,” wrote Irving Vaughan in the Chicago Tribune.
Back at Columbia, in February 1927, Berg exchanged letters with Charles Comiskey, the president and owner of the White Sox. “The Old Roman” was imperious, notorious as a cheapskate, and prone to condescension with ballplayers. When Berg contacted him from New York in February, requesting permission to again report late for spring training, Comiskey began his reply unctuously. “My Dear Young Man,” he wrote, “The time has come when you must decide as to the profession you intend following. If it is baseball, then it is most essential and important to the club and yourself that you report for spring training.” He concluded by feigning detachment. “Whether or not you decide to play baseball, the Chicago Club must continue, so you may rest assured that whatever action you take will make no difference to us.” Berg wrote him back, unconvinced, and Comiskey’s next letter resorted to a less subtle means of persuasion: cold cash. “A player reporting after the season has opened naturally is way behind the other players—as was the example in your own case last year,” Comiskey reasoned. This said, the owner added almost casually that “should you decide that you would report for spring training, I might tender you a contract, with an increase over the contract which you now have in your possession.”
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 5
