The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In New York, Berg repeated the evidence course, passed it this time, and received his LL.B. on February 26, 1930. At spring training in San Antonio, the White Sox starting catcher told Newark reporters, “I am in the pink.” In his spare time he watched Mexican dancing girls and eluded American women. One day with a woman at his side, he approached the rookie shortstop Luke Appling and asked, “Luke, will you look after this lady for a few minutes?” An hour went by, and then another. Appling took the woman to lunch, put her in a taxi, and sent her home. The next day he saw Berg. “Hey, Moe,” he said, “what happened?” Berg smiled, turned, and walked away without saying anything.

  Berg also managed to skirt the controversy that dominated March: the fate of Shires. After first spurning the White Sox contract offer, and thus winning himself a revised appellation, the “Peculiar Shires,” at the end of March Shires agreed to a contract that stipulated he “follow baseball as a serious profession,” and showed up for work in San Antonio wearing a garish diamond ring. Berg probably observed these antics with mild distaste. Both men were eccentrics, but Shires was a more typical baseball flake. He was uncouth, sophomoric, and hilarious. Berg, the elusive intellectual, always deflected attention and was careful never to flaunt his learning or to make an exception of himself.

  If Shires was the extreme, many baseball players were unpolished, to say the least. Once, after a teammate subjected Berg to some particularly vile invective, Berg turned to the man and said, “That betrays a lack of vocabulary. You shouldn’t curse. Don’t you ever use a polysyllable?” To the press, however, he was a steadfast defender of all “the gentlemen I played with.” The Washingon Post’s Shirley Povich says that “Moe was bemused and amused by ballplayers. Mostly he talked about them with benign amusement, never scorn or contempt.” Privately he sometimes discarded the respectful air and could sound condescending, even caustic, while recounting tales of teammates who stumbled when reading comic books, but whatever disdain Berg felt for ballplayers, he kept to himself. And his affection for some of his teammates, Lyons and Thomas in particular, was genuine. Most teammates would have said that he was a fine man—that they didn’t know much about him, but he was a very nice fellow. That was how Berg wanted it.

  On April 6, the White Sox, working their way north to begin the season, stopped in Arkansas for an exhibition game against the Little Rock Travelers. It was a day with a tear to it. While he led off first base, Berg’s spikes caught in the soil as he tried to change directions, and he felt a sharp pain in his knee. The next morning he was bound for Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where a serious injury was discovered. The White Sox would need a new catcher, and two months later Shires was traded to Washington for Bennie Tate. “Just call me Shires,” he said, introducing himself to his new manager, Walter Johnson. Two years later, Shires was out of baseball for good.

  And Berg? Berg didn’t become a full-time lawyer. Instead, he made a life for himself as that consummate baseball mediocrity, the third-string catcher.

  6

  You Never Knew

  He Was Around

  On May 2, 1930, a puzzling notice appeared toward the end of Edward Burns’s White Sox story in the Chicago Tribune. “If anybody in Chicago knows how Moe Berg, the first-string catcher now laid up in Chicago, is getting along,” wrote Burns, “will they please communicate with the ballclub.” Moe Berg had vanished.

  The last people to have seen him were the nuns of Saint Catherine’s convent. The nuns acted as Berg’s nurses during his hospital stay, and were charmed by “Cousin Morris.” He told such irresistible stories about baseball players, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and Masses he’d gone to as a child in New Jersey, and he spoke Latin as well as a priest. The nuns gathered at his bedside in virtual shifts, to giggle at banter that poured from him like lemonade. In return they indulged in some mild proselytizing, begged him to repeat a few Hail Marys every day—he was having none of it—and let it be known that they were praying for him anyway. Berg promised the sisters a New York City tour whenever they wished, and one winter a few of them took him up on it. The itinerary included a visit to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and a stop at Temple Emmanu-El. Perhaps the nuns knew that Berg had gone home to Newark, where his brother, Sam, now a doctor, applied heat treatments to the damaged knee, but probably they had no idea where he was. It was at about this time that Berg began compartmentalizing his life, moving quietly from destination to destination and scattering scant traces behind.

  The years 1930 and 1931 were lost baseball seasons. Berg turned up in the White Sox clubhouse in mid-May, claimed he was sound in body, and was in the White Sox starting lineup on the twenty-third. With a sheared knee ligament still healing, this was foolish. The squatting alone must have been agony. Catching every day was out of the question, and Tate was soon acquired from Washington in the deal for Shires. Berg played in only 20 games all summer and hit a humiliating .115. He was a forgotten man in Chicago.

  Only in October did Berg really go to work, beginning his legal career as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. Satterlee and Canfield was a respected Wall Street firm that melded the pedigree of Herbert Satterlee, J. P. Morgan’s son-in-law, with the academic prestige of George Canfield, a distinguished Columbia law school professor whose original partner was the future chief justice Harlan Fiske Stone. Satterlee and Canfield were gentlemen rainmakers whose discreet single-line annual bills for “services rendered” went to clients with names like Rockefeller. When it came to hiring associates, the firm chose exclusively from the graduating classes at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law schools, and their choices usually turned out to be Protestants. It was a plum job, and when Berg was offered a place, he took it. New York and New Jersey had plenty of Jewish firms, but by this time it was clear that Berg was drawn to patrician settings where he was the exception.

  The firm—now Satterlee, Stephens, Burke & Burke—has long since disposed of its records from Berg’s day and knows of nobody still living who worked with him, but Jim Dwyer, who started with Satterlee and Canfield in the early 1930s, says Berg had already departed by the time he began. So Berg’s career as a downtown New York lawyer was brief, lasting three or four winters at the most. The work probably paid very well, but left him restless.

  In April 1931, Chicago put Berg on waivers, and the Cleveland Indians claimed him. The Indians already had three catchers, Luke Sewell, Glenn Myatt, and Joe Sprinz. Berg was a speculation. If he could catch the way he had in 1929, fine. If his knee was too rickety or if he suddenly quit baseball to practice law, the outlay was only a few months’ salary. Arriving in Cleveland, Berg was sure his knee was sturdy, and playing baseball, he said, “is what I want to do.” Thereupon he came down with bronchial pneumonia. Berg had one hit for the entire season, and he may have done more for team owner Alva Bradley by taking his young son, Maury, to Cleveland’s museums on rainy days than by anything he did at the ballpark. It was a thoroughly unobtrusive year. “He never caused anybody any trouble,” says pitcher Willis Hudlin. “You never really knew he was around.”

  Moe Berg had always been a loner, and as he receded to the fringes of professional baseball, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Nobody had ever really known much about him. Now he became obviously unusual, and it began to occur to some people to wonder.

  There were his clothes. Berg was a formal dresser for a ballplayer, and fussy about his wardrobe. He favored dark gray suits, white dress shirts, a black tie, black shoes, and, sometimes, a gray fedora. What made the sartorial Berg compelling was variety. There was none. He wore this same personal uniform every day of the year for the rest of his life. He had large, very flat feet, and when he could afford to, he bought shoes that were custom made to accommodate them. In more austere times, he settled for sturdy oxfords with rounded toes and thick soles, similar to those worn by metropolitan policemen. Some people were sure that he owned just one suit, one shirt, and one tie, but a group of his teammates learned otherwise. After luring Berg from the hotel where he lived, t
hey went to his room, opened his closet, and found eight identical suits hanging neatly. Charlie Wagner, who would play with Berg on the Boston Red Sox, had a similar experience. Wagner, known as “Broadway Charlie” for his dapper appearance, was teasing Berg during a train ride. “Moe,” Wagner told him, “we need to get you a light gray suit. We need to get you a new tie.” Berg hauled down his suitcase from the luggage rack and flung it open to reveal ten identical ties. “See,” he said. “I don’t wear the same tie every day.” Berg and the nuns must have made a striking portrait in black and white.

  As to why he adopted the nearly monochromatic garb, Berg was always evasive. His sister’s explanation was that he made a pact with his friend Enrique López-Herrarte when López-Herrarte’s mother and Berg’s father died in rapid succession. That couldn’t be, however, because Berg began wearing black, white, and gray in the early 1930s, and Bernard Berg lived until 1942. The New York reporter Jimmy Breslin, a friend of Berg’s in the 1950s, once asked Berg about his clothes. “He told me he was in mourning for the world,” says Breslin.

  Whatever the explanation, this form of dress was practical for a traveling man, flattering to Berg’s olive complexion, and expedient for someone with a penchant for passing suddenly out of view.

  There were also his newspapers. Berg craved newsprint the way some people yearn for coffee or tobacco. Walking along a city sidewalk, he cut a distinctive figure, with a stack of papers cradled under his arm and stuffed into his pockets, protruding like reeds from a marsh. Berg was as particular about his newspapers as his attire. Until Berg had finished reading a paper, it was “alive” and nobody else could touch it. When he’d finished, which he often signaled by throwing it on the floor, the paper was “dead” and no longer sacrosanct. The 1930s and 1940s were wonderful days for newspaper readers, since large cities usually had several competing papers. In Boston, for example, Berg could choose from the Globe, the Evening Transcript, the Post, the Herald, the American, the Record, and the Traveler. When a big story broke, Berg bought them all. At times he had newspapers arriving from every direction (in Chicago he ordered them shipped from New York)—French papers, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, a West Coast paper from Los Angeles or San Francisco, the New York papers (he depended upon the Times), the Washington Post, the London papers a few days late, and the Manchester Guardian. When traveling, he carried a separate straw suitcase to hold them all, and he had contacts at train stops waiting to replenish his stock. The train would pull into the station, and there would be a boy, arms full of papers, looking for Mr. Berg.

  Berg was obstinate about keeping papers until he had read them, and sometimes he acquired them at such a pace that he fell far behind in his reading. No matter; he set them in stacks on any available flat surface—chairs, tables, the floor. One of his friends, the baseball comedian and coach Al Schacht, surveyed Berg’s room once and made a sarcastic reference to the piles of “dust collectors.” “No, Al,” Berg replied. “They’re alive, and they’ll stay alive until I’ve read them.” He meant it. At the end of spring training every year, the clubhouse boys packed the team’s equipment and shipped it north to Washington or Boston. In one trunk, neatly tied up to his specification in thick bundles, were Berg’s newspapers. “If you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, you don’t need to go to college,” Berg told a friend, the Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman.

  An eager conversationalist, even garrulous at times, Berg could be very funny. Yet for all the flow of talk, he kept himself to himself. He was as gray as the front page, and he behaved like a newspaper too; all the latest facts, but no reflection. “We knew a lot about [ballplayers’] private lives,” says Shirley Povich, “but he was mysterious. You never saw him hanging around the hotel lobby like the other ballplayers. They just accepted Moe for what he was—a man apart.” The game ended, and Berg showered, dressed, and disappeared. “He never told anybody what he did with his free time,” says Eldon Auker, a Red Sox pitcher. “Nobody knew much about him,” says former Boston infielder Billy Werber. “A great guy to be around,” says pitcher Jack Wilson. “Always kidding, but he never told you anything. You never bummed around with him either. He’d get a cab and he was gone.”

  BERG WAS DAMAGED now, a weak-kneed catcher scrambling to stay in the majors. His physical decline came at a time when the national optimism he had known since youth had been stifled by economic collapse. The country’s torpor paralleled his personal disarray, a fact that must have had resonance for an inveterate newspaper reader who had spent time working on Wall Street. Not that Berg had to sell apples or escort children to art exhibitions to hang on in the major leagues. He had two Ivy League degrees. He had studied at the Sorbonne. He was a lawyer. Even during the Great Depression there were jobs available to a man like this.

  At heart, however, Berg was a sensualist, and he knew of no other job that would send him to so many places, install him in plush accommodations, present him a generous meal allowance, and offer him as much free time for reading, dining, and adventure as baseball did. The rhythms of the game complemented the lifestyle he preferred. The reason other ballplayers never saw him in his free time was that, as much as he enjoyed his hours at the ballpark, in his twilight years as a professional athlete life really began for him when he got into that cab and slipped away by himself.

  Everything depended upon the association with baseball. Among ballplayers, he was something unique, a scholar in a roomful of muscle. And when he stepped out of the taxi, he achieved the inverse celebrity; to professors, actors, scientists, and politicians, he was the famous Moe Berg, the brainy baseball player. Baseball made him special in a way that drafting briefs never would have. So Berg would stay with the game as long as possible, lugubrious because he was no longer capable of playing it with distinction, yet elated still to be in uniform.

  The Indians gave Berg his unconditional release in January 1932. With catchers scarce, however, on March 10 Shirley Povich reported that the Senators owner, Clark Griffith, had invited Berg to spring training in Biloxi, Mississippi. “Judging from Berg’s record,” wrote Povich, “the chances are that Griffith would be glad to get a better man.” That said, Povich sidled up to Senators outfielder Dave “Sheriff” Harris and observed, “I see you’ve got a new catcher, Sheriff. What kind of a catcher is he?”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” said Harris, an outfielder known for his hard line drives and hardhearted one-liners.

  “I just want to tell you he speaks seven languages,” said Povich.

  “Yeah, I know,” Harris retorted, “and he can’t hit in any of them.”

  On March 13, Povich spoke to Berg, apparently for the first time, and discovered someone who would delight him, and so his readers, for the next three years. This time he wrote about Berg with all skepticism vanquished: “The average mental capacity of the Washington Ball Club was hiked several degrees with the acquisition of the eminent Mr. Moe Berg, late of the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians, who has joined the Nats from the ranks of the free agents and is destined to do considerable catching in Washington regalia.” Povich, an orthodox Jew, reported that Berg was “the most famous linguist in baseball with his command of languages variously put at from 7 to 27 … he laughs off the idea that he gives signs in Hindu, and declares that Yiddish will usually suffice.”

  Povich had found his man, and Berg, too, had found his. Berg was often petulant in response to articles like Povich’s. “I wish less attention were paid to my linguistic accomplishments,” he huffed to the American Mercury in 1940. “Too much has been made of this by the newspapers,” he said sternly to Baseball magazine editor F. C. Lane, when Lane asked him about Sanskrit. Actually, Berg was eager to accommodate journalists, and he cultivated them like so many marigolds. “I don’t suppose there was ever a man in baseball who was more popular with the press than Moe,” said Ted Lyons in a letter to Ethel Berg. Rick Ferrell, with whom Berg would play for the Red Sox, says, “Moe
had connections with the top people—the owners, the writers, the manager. He associated with them more than he did with his teammates. I never saw him with other players.”

  Every day Berg sat in the dugout before the game and told stories to crowds of reporters. All his life, he made a point of befriending young sportswriters, from Povich and Kieran to Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune and Ira Berkow of the New York Times. It’s no coincidence that Berg was in the sports pages without respite until he died. Not only was he unique, he was available.

  More profiles of Berg were published than of any other journeyman ballplayer in history. He submitted to a surfeit of interviewers who later made outrageous claims for his linguistic, legal, and literary acumen, and elevated a well-educated ballplayer to a savant in shin guards. No matter how many languages reporters claimed that Berg spoke, there is no record of his ever taking real umbrage, much less demanding a correction. The exaggerations didn’t bother him.

  To the contrary, he accepted interview requests with alacrity and was at pains to give the writer what he wanted. Preparing a profile of Berg, Donald Stuart discovered, was no effort at all. “The minute he learned our reason for accosting him in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, he ordered a taxi and, once inside, proceeded to interview himself,” wrote Stuart. Make no mistake, Berg liked the company of reporters. It was pure pleasure for him to go walking to the Boston Public Garden with John Kieran and translate the Latin inscriptions they found there, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that Kieran’s torrent of Professor Berg stories distinguished him from every other ballplayer in the business. “You kept me in the big leagues for years,” he wrote Kieran shortly before his death in 1972, and both men knew there was some truth there. In 1929, he was a fine catcher. In the 1930s, when he was scarred and going to fat, his mystique helped him keep his job.