The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Buildings in downtown Tokyo at the time were limited in height both because of earthquakes and because of a decree that no man should be able to look down upon the emperor’s imperial palace. Saint Luke’s was in Tsukiji, a residential neighborhood built on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay. It was over a mile from the palace, so the seven stories with piazza and bell tower above made Saint Luke’s among the tallest buildings in Tokyo. Saint Luke’s rose like a single cornstalk amidst the brown field of low-slung wooden houses surrounding it. From the piazza, you could see for miles in all directions.

  Entering the hospital, Berg asked in Japanese for directions to Mrs. Lyon’s room. He was told to take the elevator to the fifth floor. How he got past the reception area was always a mystery to Elsie Lyon. Her mother was on hand and was behaving like a dragon, barring all visitors except those whose impending visits she’d registered with the desk. Perhaps the sight of a six-foot-one-inch burly man clad in a kimono and geta in a country where the men were generally lithe and half a foot shorter than Berg was sufficiently unnerving that he was waved on without a contest. At the fifth floor he alighted, dumped the flowers in a trash can, stepped back into the elevator, and pressed seven.

  Off the seventh floor was the piazza, a nice place to have lunch. But Berg didn’t stop there. Instead, he passed through a door and climbed a narrow spiral staircase to the bell tower, where, exactly as he’d been told, between the latticed windows on all sides was a stunning panoramic view of Tokyo. From beneath his kimono Berg drew out the movie camera. His hands appear to have been shaking in many of the four hours’ worth of film he shot on his trip, but for the next twenty-three seconds they were firm as feldspar. The Bell and Howell was a powerful instrument, and as Berg panned the city, shipyards, industrial complexes, and military installations around Tokyo Bay, he also recorded Mount Fuji, sixty miles away. Finished, he secreted the camera, climbed down the staircase, and left. He had not so much as set eyes upon Elsie Lyon. On December 1, the American team played at Utsunomiya. Berg was there, and it was as though he’d never been gone. He didn’t play an inning.

  Following the Utsunomiya game, the Americans sailed to Shanghai on the Empress of Canada, where they played one game, and then completed their schedule in the Philippines with games at a Manila ballpark on December 9 and 10. In Manila, Berg was told that back in Cleveland the Indians had released all rights to his contract. He was now in every respect a free agent. So, camera in hand, he headed north.

  On January 4, he turned up in Korea, where trouble finally found him. “Strange Foreigner Taking Photographs of Yalu Bridge,” said the headlines in the next day’s Osaka Mainichi. Berg had been riding in the observation car at the end of the Hikari Express, and as it passed over the bridge across the Yalu River dividing China and Korea a sentry saw him taking photographs. The sentry reported Berg to the Antung police, who arrested him, confiscated 25 feet of film, and set him free. Berg then set about making travel arrangements. He’d been wanting to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

  In Manchouli he boarded the train for the six-day ride. Fabled a trip as it may be, taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad in winter is for long stretches bound to be a rather dull experience, especially when you don’t speak Russian. Whenever the train halted, Berg walked outside and filmed the barren countryside. Once he got to Moscow, things picked up. Strolling about the city in the heavy, full-length overcoat he’d purchased, Berg was in the midst of filming Lenin’s tomb when he was confronted by two plainclothes policemen who demanded his film. Berg gave it to them, and was sent on his way with a warning not to use his camera anymore.

  Continuing his meandering, Berg came upon a board fence. He peered through a hole and discovered that the Moscow subway was being dug by a corps of women using picks. He couldn’t resist. “I was young then, and what the heck” is how he later explained it. Out came the camera. Moments later someone was tapping his shoulder. It was a Red Army soldier, who took his passport and left him there. Berg told John Kieran that he stood on the corner for five hours in 20-below-zero weather before the soldier returned and handed him his passport without a word. Berg took this as a cue that his time in Russia was up. After he crossed into Poland, he was searched, and two rolls of film were taken from him. The overcoat had deep pockets, however, and when he arrived in New York in April, the souvenirs in his luggage included a ceremonial Japanese happi jacket, the Moe Berg kimono from Mizuno, a Russian fur hat, and two reels of film. Berg would never again visit Japan, but for the rest of his life he talked constantly about his time there.

  8

  Mr. Berg,

  You’ve Been Brilliant

  With no job in baseball waiting for him, Berg went home to Newark. That couldn’t have been thoroughly pleasant. The Bergs had it in their minds that they were special, superior to other people, including their own. They often disdained gatherings of their by now sprawling extended family, and at the functions they did attend—Rose liked to go—they held themselves aloof, maintaining a discreet but emphatic distance. All three Berg children were professionals. Ethel had become a public school kindergarten teacher, Sam was an established young pathologist with a family practice on the side. For the most talented of the brood to breeze in from Asia and lounge about the house playing the prodigal son while everyone else contributed toward burnishing the Berg name wouldn’t have done. Fortunately for Berg, another family, in Washington, was experiencing tensions of its own, and out of that strife came employment for him.

  Clark Griffith had made his son-in-law the manager of the Senators in 1933, when Joe Cronin was as young as many rookies. All was well while the shortstop took them to the pennant, but at the end of the more dour 1934 season Cronin became expendable. In December, Griffith traded him with a flourish, sending him and Mildred to Boston for Lyn Lary and $225,000.

  On April 11, 1935, the Red Sox played an exhibition game in Newark, on their way from spring training in Sarasota, Florida, to Boston. Berg appears to have gone to the ballpark and told his old chum Cronin that he was looking for work, because six days later, when the Red Sox opened the season on a chilly afternoon in the Bronx against the Yankees, Berg was with them. The usually hardboiled Boston press corps warmed to him immediately. “It was so cold at Yankee Stadium they say that Moe Berg, new member of the Red Sox, was talking Eskimo,” cracked Harold Kaese in the Evening Transcript.

  In the five years Berg played for Cronin in Boston, he appeared in an average of fewer than 30 games a season, which meant that he was doing very little catching and throwing. Some days he didn’t even practice. The Red Sox were all out on the field warming up one afternoon, when Cronin glanced over toward the bench and saw Berg reading a newspaper. Cronin asked him just what he was doing, and Berg, looking up briefly, replied, “You lead your life and I’ll lead mine and next year we’ll beat the Yankees.”

  All this, obviously, Cronin could tolerate. His and Berg’s was a symbiotic relationship. Cronin kept Berg in baseball, Berg gave Cronin advice. There was more. Cronin was a congenial man—“sweet-natured,” Shirley Povich called him—but he was no intellectual, which may have pained him. “Joe Cronin liked to associate with the higher-echelon people,” says Ted Williams, who began his lustrous career with the Red Sox in 1939. “He didn’t waste his time with a lot of yokels.” That people looked at Berg and thought of Cronin lent an aura of respectability to the manager, in much the same way that the brilliant members of a Parisian salon reflect well upon the wealthy woman who assembles them. Another personal quality of Cronin’s was superstition. If you tried to hand him a two-dollar bill, for instance, he’d send you out to find a pair of singles. Moe Berg may have been his good luck charm.

  Not that Berg was just an ornament. If that were the case, Cronin would have made him a coach. Berg could still catch, and do it well—a rare enough skill then, as now, as to make him valuable. Boston pitchers like Lefty Grove and especially Jack Wilson would request Berg, the way Tommy Thomas and Ted Lyons had with the White
Sox. “A lot of guys thought that because he knew Joe Cronin was the only reason he was there,” says Wilson. “But I’ll tell you one thing, he was a great catcher.”

  Spectators groused about Berg’s low batting averages, but not his teammates, who admired the way his mitt made peace with a scorching Grove fastball. What they questioned was his inclination. “He didn’t care whether he played or not, he just wanted to be on the team,” says Gene Desautels, who caught for the Red Sox from 1937 to 1940.

  “He was a fine catcher; we all felt he was an intelligent catcher,” says Boston infielder Billy Werber. “He had a good arm, he could hit occasionally, but he’d rather sit and talk baseball than play it. He liked to be around ballplayers, but he didn’t always want to play. We all felt he was a little lazy.”

  Nobody was more aware of the games Berg wasn’t catching than Rick Ferrell, who was catching them for him. At 150 pounds, “Little” Rick was one of baseball’s smallest players, and one of its best catchers. The future Hall of Famer caught for Boston from 1934 until the team traded him during the 1937 season. He was resolute and, for his size, he was durable—two fortunate traits, considering his replacement. A reserve catcher generally catches the second game of a doubleheader, but not on the Red Sox when Moe Berg was the backup. “Joe Cronin’s locker was two down from mine,” says Ferrell. “We’d play a doubleheader in Boston and Moe’d come over to my locker after I caught the first game and say, ‘Rick, you’re the greatest catcher in the American League. Joe, let’s not change the lineup.’ So I’d catch two games. I didn’t care. He didn’t want to play unless he had to.”

  What to make of this lawyer who wasn’t working on Wall Street, this linguist who wasn’t teaching at Princeton, this ballplayer who didn’t seem interested in playing ball? With Berg, potential was a red herring. Was he lazy? In conventional terms, perhaps. But Berg was not living a conventional life. His priorities were different from most people’s. He was making use of baseball to plot a life of wandering curiosity. Nothing made him as happy or as comfortable as the routine of a ballplayer. “Isn’t this wonderful,” he said once. “Work three hours a day, travel around the country, live in the best hotels, meet the best people, and get paid for it.” He had no new interests except those that developed casually within the confines of baseball’s daily calendar. Many men could have been lawyers. It took an unusual person to resist convention, live by his wits, and form himself into the character that Moe Berg was becoming.

  MOE BERG WAS an eccentric with a taste for conformity. He didn’t at all wish to be one of the boys, but a level of acceptance among his teammates was important to him. He wanted them to like him, admire him, and—oh, perverse man—he wanted them to leave him alone.

  On the baseball field Berg commanded respect by surpassing expectations. What teammates like Rick Ferrell regarded as simple indolence was also part of a subtle calculus designed to avoid failure. Most baseball players respond well to playing frequently. An aging Berg was the opposite. Unless there was nobody else to catch, he played only when he felt spry. In this way he preserved his reputation as a fine catcher, and elicited admiring comments from teammates like Red Nonnenkamp, a reserve himself, who found it “remarkable” that Berg could be “inactive for so long, and then Cronin would put him in and he’d really be something.” As for all the games Berg didn’t play, well, better to be seen as lazy than incompetent. Besides, the supposed indifference reminded his teammates that he had weighty interests outside baseball. For the Red Sox to believe that, as Nonnenkamp put it, “baseball wasn’t his main concern” added to Berg’s mystique. Baseball was his main concern. It made everything else possible. But why should he let them know that?

  Berg was still a reticent man, but on certain subjects—namely, his travels—he could be downright loquacious. “In the bull pen he’d keep you spellbound,” says Boston pitcher Jack Wilson. “For seven years we sat in the bull pen laughing and telling stories. He talked to you any time you wanted to talk. He’d talk about his travels. He’d tell you about something in Latvia and then in the next minute it was something in China or Japan.” After one game Al Schacht remembered Wilson, full of excitement, blurting to him, “Al, you should have been in the bull pen this afternoon. Moe had us in Russia!” Some of the players couldn’t quite follow Berg all the time, but the gestalt was enough. “Moe was really something in the bull pen,” one of them said. “We’d sit around and listen to him discuss the Greeks, the Romans, the Japanese, anything. Hell, we didn’t know what he was talking about, but it sure sounded good.” Berg was proud of his storytelling, to the point where he collected stories about telling stories. “I was warming up a pitcher one day in the bull pen and we got to talking about that trip to Siberia,” he told the Boston journalist Joe Fitzgerald in 1967. “It seemed everyone wanted me to talk about that. Well, the pitcher was called into the game, but we didn’t realize it because we were still discussing Siberia in the bull pen. The umpires came running out to see what was wrong. They laughed when we told them. We could do things like that then.”

  Besides entertaining the relief pitchers, Berg’s sagas of adventure naturally provided baseball writers with plenty of material. Berg even put in some time himself at a typewriter, taking the readers of the Boston American on the bull pen tour. Substituting for the “Mr. Boston” columnist, Berg composed an essay predicting that baseball would soon become an international game. He started off lamely with a mock comparison between the butterfingered French actors he’d seen in a Parisian production of The Merchant of Venice and sure-handed American outfielders, a device that had the unfortunate effect of appearing both strained and pretentious. After that, however, the tone shifted markedly, into a lively, thoughtful piece of writing. “It would be difficult to find even one major league club without at least one player in the first generation of people who emigrated to this country,” wrote Berg. “Certainly the special attributes of the baseball player aren’t confined to our people or those raised here. We have all seen Italians with supple shoulders, Russians with limber arms, Poles with prehensile fingers, and Greeks with speed of foot and endurance.” Next he moved on to what he’d seen in Japan, the first country outside the U.S. to take a serious interest in baseball. “Here are people who less than 100 years ago had no intercourse at all with the outside world, and had their own distinctive Oriental manner of life, disporting themselves under the code of the Samurai with only swords. Yet in the morning paper you may read that Waseda University in Tokyo beat Yale at baseball. The Japanese are playing ball by the thousands.” After describing the tea plants outside the ballpark at Shizuoka, and two store clerks he saw playing catch under a Tokyo street lamp at midnight, he concluded, “Perhaps the second generation of Japanese, born into baseball with mitts on their hands, will compete with us.” Berg may not have been a writer, but there are professions that prize a man who sees what others don’t.

  The Red Sox traveled the country by Pullman car in the 1930s. Huge blocks of ice placed in special compartments above the car, and lower berths for all members of the team, made the train a cool and comfortable means of getting to Detroit or St. Louis. While most players divided into groups for poker or bridge games, Berg sat alone, reading. Beside him he kept a rice farmer’s basket he’d picked up in Japan filled with enough books to last him the intervals between newspaper editions. He was a fairly rapid reader, but occasionally a single book was enough. “I remember one trip we went on,” says Eldon Auker. “Moe got on the train. He was all excited. He had a book about four feet thick. The title was The Holy Bible in 1000 Languages. It must have weighed twenty pounds. He couldn’t wait to sit down and open it up. He’d found it somewhere in Boston. It made his day and, I guess, most of his year.”

  There was a benevolent quality to Berg’s efforts at socializing. When Jack Wilson confided that he was having tax troubles, Berg took him to an office in Washington and, just like that, Wilson’s problems were behind him. Berg knew the New York ticket agent Sam Roth, an
d when the Red Sox were in town to play the Yankees, Berg arranged for passes to plays and musicals. He could provide the entertainment himself, too. In Boston, Berg once invited the whole team and their wives to a screening of his travel films. “Quite a few of us went,” says Jack Wilson. “They didn’t mean nothing to us.”

  Once in a while, Berg would spend an evening alone with a teammate or two. Bobby Doerr, a handsome young second baseman who joined the team in 1937, got a few brief whiffs of Berg’s world. Berg would look at Doerr and say, “C’mon, take a walk with me,” and off they’d go, usually on a tour of dime stores. In 1933, Berg had invested some money in Novelart, a stationery and film production company. He liked to visit the card departments to see what Novelart’s competitors were up to. In Florida, he took Doerr through a private gambling casino. In New York, they paid a call on Jay C. Flippen, at the tomato-faced actor’s apartment. Doerr was thrilled. It seemed to him that Moe knew everybody.

  Berg also began spending time with the pitcher Charlie Wagner, who had joined the team that year. For all his color, Wagner was somewhat uncouth as a young man, “a raw-boned kid from Reading, Pennsylvania,” he likes to say. Berg became his Pygmalion. “He helped me with English—a lesson every day in the bull pen,” says Wagner. “We used to eat together. He taught me etiquette, eating, ordering at big hotels, how to treat waiters. He was a classy guy. We’d have nice long evenings of talk.” Sometimes they went to Greek restaurants, where Berg ordered his meal in Greek. Wagner says that a waiter once told him that Berg “speaks better Greek than I do.” In New York they would head for Leo Lindy’s, then in its prime as a late-night roost for actors, musicians, horse-players, and showgirls. Wagner thought it was wonderful. “You’d go to dinner with Moe,” he says, “and before you knew it, there was a table of eight talking baseball.”