The Catcher Was a Spy

There’s a neglected history of baseball’s relationship with U.S. foreign and military policy, for better or worse. Prior to World War II, the sport was used as a form of baseball diplomacy between two baseball-loving nations: the U.S. and Japan, to hopefully forestall war. It helped but not enough. 

Amidst the diplomacy was something more surreptitious. On the frequent U.S. baseball tours of Japan in the 1930s, a marginal ballplayer who happened to speak Japanese secretly filmed Tokyo and other cities for the OSS. Moe Berg was an American spy who used baseball as his cover and whose films facilitated… show more.

As Dawidoff writes in this account of elusive Berg (1902-72), the major league catcher who also worked for the US as a spy, “[Hank] Greenberg punctured the stereotype that Jews were unathletic. Berg suggests that you could get a top education and be a ballplayer too.” A Princeton graduate who could speak twelve languages (but couldn’t hit in any of them), the OSS sent him to Germany during World War II to determine the state of Germany’s atomic bomb capacity. Rebuffed by the CIA after the war, the secretive, impoverished, self-consciously Jewish Berg became a world-wandering Jew. One of his… show more.