It was undoubtedly by Kieran’s agency both that Berg was invited to appear on the show and that Berg agreed to do it. Kieran knew how well read Berg was, and the sportswriter may also have heard about the game Berg’s teammates invented to pass the time on the annual train trip north from spring training. As the train pulled into a new town, someone would sing out “Information, please!” and Berg would dutifully provide the essential characteristics of the place, its size, principal industries, famous natives, and more. In New York for the real thing, Berg made only one stipulation: no legal questions should be put to him. Why a lawyer wished to avoid the law, he didn’t explain.
Edith Engel interviewed Berg before he appeared on the program, as she screened almost every prospective guest. In the brief time they spent together, Engel sensed that Berg was a complicated fellow. “You could tell how comfortable people were at digging into their own encyclopedia,” she says. “He was very comfortable. He could call on difficult things without scratching his head. He put a finger on his intellectual file very easily. But there was a dichotomy because he didn’t reveal anything about himself. I sensed there was a door closed and you shouldn’t even peek through the keyhole. There was a charm about him but you worried about revealing Mr. Hyde if you went too far. He set his limitations and implied, ‘Don’t trespass.’ ” None of this speculation made Berg unsuitable for the show. Indeed, Engel thought Berg would do very well, and so she sent him onto the air.
On February 21, 1939, Fadiman introduced him. “Professor Berg catches for the Boston Red Sox,” he said. “In addition, he’s got a string of degrees long enough to hang yourself. A philological baseball player is something new on this program. Okay, Mr. Berg. I’ll pitch ’em, you catch ’em.” Then came the first question, and Berg didn’t know that Tweedledum and Tweedledee quarreled over a rattle. This was surprising, given the time he’d spent studying the chess games in Through the Looking Glass. After that, however, he was dazzling. He identified the bordereau, a supposedly incriminating document from the Dreyfus affair, and the Willy/Nicky correspondence between Czar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm. “You do a lot of things besides catching for the Boston Red Sox, don’t you, Mr. Berg?” asked Fadiman. There was no response, so the game continued. Berg knew that poi was a Hawaiian root eaten instead of bread, loy was the ancient French spelling of law, and soy, the word from which chop suey is derived. For an American-presidents-as-athletes question, he identified Teddy Roosevelt as a one-time boxer, Warren Harding as a former sportswriter, and threw in, free of charge, that Woodrow Wilson had played some baseball at Princeton. He said that Halley’s was the most visible comet, and chose the sun as the brightest star in the sky. “Are you popular with your teammates, Mr. Berg?” asked Fadiman. A moment later the half hour was up, and Fadiman thanked him “for catching them so neatly. You’ve been brilliant.”
Other people thought so too. Adams sent him a telegram in which he said, “Such a combination of wisdom and knowledge is so uncommon as to be conspicuous.” Throughout the next summer, baseball writers recounted Berg’s triumph. Several put him “on the stand” themselves for further question-and-answer sessions, which he endured gracefully. In a lengthy interview, Taylor Spink of Sporting News asked Berg what had led him to be on the show. Berg replied, “This may sound like hokum to you—because those folks really pay well. But I was induced to go on in order to do a missionary job for the game.” He succeeded, at least according to baseball’s commissioner. Kenesaw Mountain Landis called Berg over to his box one day in Chicago. “Berg,” he said, “in just thirty minutes you did more for baseball than I’ve done the entire time I’ve been commissioner.”
NBC received boxes of letters—24,000 of them, according to Berg—calling for more Berg, and so the following fall he was back twice, in mid-October and late November. His second show went fine. In a flat, somber, slightly nasal tone that had some Newark in it, he revealed how much he knew about Latin cognates, political history, and world geography. The third appearance was another matter. Here the first question was a lark—a change-up, in baseball argot. Each man was asked to give the date of his wedding anniversary and of his wife’s birthday. “Mr. Berg, are you married?” asked Fadiman. “I am not,” said Berg. He sounded tense. Kieran consistently knew the most answers, but he didn’t know this one and restored the atmosphere of levity by botching Margaret’s birthday. After the laughter subsided, Fadiman, moving on, addressed Berg again. “Mr. Berg,” he said, “you were once a lawyer among your spare extra vocations, weren’t you?” “I refuse to answer,” replied Berg. The question dealt with the distinction between “immaterial” and “irrelevant,” and as Kieran fumbled with it, Fadiman appealed to Berg. “What would you say to that, Mr. Berg?” Berg had meant it when he said no law questions. “Who am I to judge?” he said. “To a legal mind I’m sure these two words have nothing in common whatsoever,” snapped Fadiman before asking a new question. A sensitive man might well have construed Fadiman’s final remark as an insult. After it, Berg attempted to answer almost nothing in what was easily his worst performance, and he never again appeared on the show. “He was not very forthcoming,” Fadiman remembers. “We didn’t get to know him at all.” Fadiman and others on the show had suspicions about Berg. They thought he was a spy.
BY 1939, ONLY a handful of players—Lefty Grove, Ted Lyons, Charlie Gehringer—had been in the American League for as many years as Berg. His longevity, his press clippings, and his success on the radio made him a celebrity, or, more properly, a celebrated curiosity. Famous as he was by now, very few people actually paid attention to Berg’s baseball career. They followed men who excelled, like Jimmie Foxx, the Red Sox brawny first baseman. With Foxx, the game was everything. With Berg, baseball was a prism that revealed a singular personality. Foxx meant home runs. Berg meant intelligence, mystery, and the hint of adventure. One man made you cheer, the other made you wonder.
To Jewish fans, Berg meant something more. American Jews were looking for heroes. They had one in Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers handsome, slugging first baseman. A second-generation American Jew from the Bronx, Greenberg had become one of the best players in baseball. This success was an inspiration to vast numbers of Jewish Americans, particularly those of Greenberg’s generation. Many immigrant Jewish parents pushed their children to transcend cultural inferiority “by virtue,” says Philip Roth, “of that cultural elixir known as a good education.” Greenberg helped people believe there was another way. Bert Gordon, a retired Detroit real estate broker, told Roger Angell, “I don’t think anybody can imagine the terrific importance of Hank Greenberg to the Jewish community. He was a God, a true folk hero. That made baseball acceptable to our parents, so for once they didn’t mind if we took a little time off from the big process of getting into college.”
Moe Berg was a foil to Greenberg. Greenberg punctured the stereotype that Jews were unathletic. Berg suggested that you could get a top education and be a ballplayer, too. “Hank Greenberg, by being a star, was the shining knight,” says Don Shapiro, who grew up in Detroit. “Moe Berg, by being an intellectual, confirmed our ideals. He was a legend in the sense that we all knew about him, knew how smart he was. He was important to Jews because he confirmed that you could be an intellectual and an athlete and an American, too. He was to wider society first a ballplayer and a towering intellect. He was Einstein in knickers.”
Greenberg was a source of ethnic solidarity. Toward the end of his 1938 pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record, each turn at bat sent swells of anticipation through Jewish neighborhoods, where Tiger broadcasts murmured from radios on every porch. Greenberg assumed the burden of being a hero to Jews, while Berg distanced himself from religion. Yet even if Judaism was of limited spiritual importance to him, opposing players would have reminded him at every opportunity that his blood was different. Harry Danning, a Jewish catcher for the New York Giants in the 1930s, says, “They called you lots of names. Everybody did. You were supposed to ride the other tea
m.”
Berg didn’t like to discuss his brushes with anti-Semitism, and when he did, his stock response was “If you do your job and stay out of trouble, you won’t experience such things on a broad level.” Publicly, Greenberg also minimized what he’d experienced. Yet to close friends who pressed him on the matter, he admitted that at times the ethnic slurs he absorbed were painful, and made him want to fight. Berg, a proud man who never responded well to teasing of any sort, undoubtedly felt the same way when opponents called him “a dirty kike,” which they did. It may have been a day when ethnic slurs were just part of the game, but it was also a period in history when reports of Jewish genocide were beginning to emerge from Europe. However it is dressed, hostility rarely feels pleasant, and it couldn’t have pleased Moe Berg. This was especially true when it came from his teammates.
Most of the Red Sox members treated him fine. “What the hell, he was Jewish, I was German, Cronin was Irish,” says Eldon Auker. “Moe Berg was well respected. I never heard any slurs.” Pitcher Joe Dobson says that he “never thought about him being Jewish at all.”
Others, however, weren’t so oblivious. Sometimes it was just a matter of the relief pitchers engaging in friendly bull-pen banter. Jack Wilson, who was fond of Berg, would take a minor Berg transgression as an opportunity to ask him “what the rabbi would think of that.” It was all in jest and Berg knew it. “He’d say, ‘The hell with the rabbi,’ ” says Wilson. “He didn’t seem interested in religion.” Yet, when he is discussing the loquacious and sometimes abrasive Al Schacht, a Red Sox coach who was Jewish, Wilson no longer sounds so puckish. “There’s one son-of-a-bitch Jew who wasn’t liked,” says Wilson.
Players could be just as crass about Berg. “The people on the ball club didn’t like him,” says Billy Werber. “He wasn’t of their stripe. He was Jewish and people were less tolerant of that then.” Pitcher Herb Hash says he had little to do with Berg, explaining, “The Jewboys didn’t associate with us as much as with their own kind.” At six foot one and 200 pounds, Berg was a large man, and not one to trifle with. If Red Sox members were casting anti-Semitic aspersions his way, they were probably doing so out of his hearing. Still, he would have known that when some people looked at him they thought “Jew,” even if they said nothing. This must have pained a man who went to lengths never to appear the social exception.
TED WILLIAMS JOINED the Red Sox in 1939, a headstrong, jubilant bundle of sinewy talent. Cronin asked Berg to watch over him a little, help break him in. At first Williams had trouble getting along with some of Boston’s veteran players, but he and Berg grew fond of each other in a distant sort of way. “He liked me as a player and a kid,” says Williams. “I think he liked my young, enthusiastic approach to it all.” This self-portrait contrasted vividly with Williams’s impression of Berg. “Moe was only sixteen years older than I was, but he was much more subdued than the average guy even of that age. Not a lot of pep or vinegar.” Not a lot of playing, either. Berg batted 33 times in the 14 games. “Gentlemen,” he would say when Cronin sent him in, “does everyone still get three strikes out there?”
Berg had been serving mostly as a bull pen catcher and aide-de-camp to Cronin for two years, turning in reports on young pitchers and working with the catchers. Now with a strapping backstop named George Lacy on hand, Cronin decided to make coaching Berg’s official position. On February 2, 1940, the Associated Press reported, “The linguistic Moe Berg, who has mastered all the finer arts except hitting, will be missing from the baseball box scores this coming season for the first time in seventeen years.”
As a coach, one of Berg’s first tasks was to do for the rookie outfielder Dominic DiMaggio what he’d done for Williams. At spring training, Cronin asked Berg to room with DiMaggio. On March 10, soon after they moved in together, DiMaggio injured an ankle tumbling into Johnny Peacock at the plate during an intersquad game. The next day Cronin and the Boston owner Tom Yawkey came to see how he was. Berg was out, but he’d left a signature; the only chair in the room was covered with a neat pile of newspapers. Yawkey and Cronin were tempted into a little fun. They scattered the papers all over the room and then, giggling, escorted DiMaggio out. When DiMaggio returned to the room, he found the papers gone and Berg’s closet empty as well. There was a note: “Dominic, you have too many friends—my newspapers are too important to me.”
DiMaggio found Berg intelligent and unobtrusive, though he wondered about him. “I thought, here’s a bright guy, what’s he doing playing baseball? He couldn’t have been making much money. If he had many pairs of clothes I didn’t see them.” Although he claimed on a government application to be earning as much as $15,000 a year from the Red Sox, Berg’s actual salary was $7,500 in 1941. Together with his earnings from Novelart, he was probably earning between $10,000 and $12,000, a good middle-class income for someone with no dependents. Yet for a man with expensive tastes, even one who was unburdened by a mortgage and didn’t accumulate possessions, high living could consume it all quickly.
DiMaggio wasn’t the only young player who had questions about Berg. Many of the Red Sox members wondered what exactly his baseball job was. The Boston Globe wrote of “the effervescent Moe Berg, who will work with baby pitchers,” but Cronin had hired a new pitching coach, Frank Shellenback, to work with the prize young prospects Herb Hash and Bill Butland. “I don’t really know what Berg was doing,” says Butland. Hash didn’t either. He remembers that Berg “was real quiet, stayed mostly to himself and had an armful of newspapers morning, night, and noon.”
In late March 1941, after training in Sarasota, the Red Sox sailed to Cuba for some exhibition games on the baseball-crazed island. Berg had a grand time. He brushed up on his Spanish and, according to Wagner, “spoke it better than the guys who sold orange juice.” (He didn’t write it quite as well, however. In a Cuban restaurant in Tampa, Berg and John Kieran saluted the chef by carving into the wall “comer nemos comides”—this is one of the best meals we have ever eaten. The sentiment was nice, but the grammar was lacking. The past participle of comer is comido.) On the boat from Florida, Berg told Doerr about Cuba and told a lot of things to a married American woman who fell for him completely and allowed herself to be seduced.
Except to give the very clear impression that, as Cronin put it, “he was a charmer with ladies,” Berg kept his romantic life as secret as anything else. Certainly he could be a devastating flirt, able to come at a conversation from so many angles. People saw him with attractive women now and then, but never the same one twice. He could be slightly lubricious; on the back of a photograph of a woman named Kelly he wrote in a memo to himself, “Kelly has a beautiful leg and what a fanny.”
In 1941, Berg spent a second summer amusing himself as the bull pen coach. The Red Sox had a teenage midget batboy named Donald Davidson, and sometimes Berg would hoist Davidson onto his knee and help him with his French and Latin lessons. Davidson’s parents were amazed when he brought home A’s in Latin and French. Berg did some composing of his own, too. In May, he received a letter from Edward Weeks, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Weeks said that he wondered a lot about pitchers—“how they learn to be cooney,” as he put it—and wanted Berg to write him a “paper” explaining what it takes “to be better than the average.” Berg mulled over the proposal and accepted. In September, Weeks published a lissome, erudite, and thoroughly winning piece of prose, in which Berg held forth on pitching, as he’d been asked to do, and catching, as seemed only reasonable.
“Pitchers and Catchers” remains the most concise adult primer on the essential art of baseball. Still regularly anthologized, it runs ten book pages in length, and between the stout first sentence (“Baseball men agree with the philosopher that perfection—which means a pennant to them—is attainable only through a proper combination of opposites.”) and the terse, cryptic finale (“The game’s the thing.”), Berg concerns himself with the nuances of the sport that separate players of comparable physical abilities. At first glance, some of
Berg’s conclusions read like bromides, but one doesn’t object, both because the writing is so smooth and also because there is always the understanding that Berg was among the first to approach baseball with such literary seriousness.
His essay is full of pleasures. “Good fielding and pitching, without hitting, or vice versa, is like Ben Franklin’s half a pair of scissors—ineffectual” is typical of the bright, pithy tone. There are phrases in Latin and French, explanations of phenomena like the two o’clock hitter—a man who is a slugger in batting practice and futile during the game—and why catchers give the signals—since they crouch, they can hide them more easily than the pitcher can. The dead-ball era came to an end after World War I, says Berg, because of changes in the availability of foreign ingredients and adjustments in yarn-winding technology. He tells his reader how to throw a forkball and a knuckleball and discusses the many ways pitchers seek to get an edge on hitters, or, as he puts it, “to fool the hitter—there’s the rub.” Wily Ted Lyons, for example, constantly varied the pace of his windup and the style of his delivery. Fastball specialist Lefty Grove waited a year to throw his forkball, and then in a moment of crisis, flabbergasted an opposing batter by sending him one of the slower pitches.
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