The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Yet it went deeper than clever pragmatism. Berg’s voluble way with the media belied an essential elusiveness. “I was fascinated by him, respected him, admired him,” says Povich. “He had a great attraction for writers. He brought up subjects that were always interesting. He was so cognizant of world affairs. He’d trace the names of certain writers. He’d tell John Keller, ‘Keller’s German for cellar.’ He could charm or fascinate anybody. He just didn’t talk about himself. He deflected always. You learned quickly not to ask him.” There was the rub. All these stories Berg was distributing were incomplete. Professor Berg the linguist and lawyer was there, Moe Berg the person was not.

  Why the camouflage? There was nothing sinister here. Berg was no villain. He was a baseball player speaking to men who wanted to write humor, to flatter rather than harm him. Besides, he was also an unusually talented and intelligent young man, not a charlatan of any sort. All true, but he was one more thing, a man with secrets.

  THE 1932 SENATORS won 93 games and were the best team Berg had yet played for. Shortstop Joe Cronin, married to Griffith’s daughter, Mildred, and outfielder Heinie Manush were powerful hitters; Alvin Crowder and Monte Weaver were two of baseball’s better pitchers. Berg played in 75 games for the Senators, and though he hit only .236, he was potent when it mattered. After starting catcher Roy Spencer injured his knee, Berg caught regularly, and his defense made him an important member of a team that missed finishing in second place by a single game. He threw out 35 base runners and made no errors. “I would say that, barring Bill Dickey and Mickey Cochrane, Berg has caught as well as any man in the American league,” said Washington manager Walter Johnson toward the end of the year. And now, best of all, Berg’s solid defense was taking him abroad. In October he boarded a passenger ship bound for Japan. He was going to teach the Japanese baseball.

  7

  Strange Foreigner

  with Camera

  A few occasions in Moe Berg’s life gratified him so much that he recalled them often in conversation or reverie, and over time they came to form who he was. Some people acquire a spouse, children, a home, furniture, an automobile, or an album full of vacation snapshots. Moe Berg never married, fathered children, took vacations, learned to drive, or owned much of anything besides the black, white, and gray clothes he wore on his back and the books he stacked in his brother’s house. What he collected were experiences, signal moments gathered like pretty quartz stones along the shore and then fingered again and again until they were polished to a shimmer. As it happened, most of his experiences occurred abroad and included his few months at the Sorbonne, his wartime service in Europe, and his two trips to Japan, in 1932 and 1934.

  An American missionary named Horace Wilson introduced baseball to Japan in 1872. Influential daimyo (feudal lords) decided that baseball was an American martial art and urged young Japanese boys to develop the American spirit by playing it. The spirit of kendo prevailed, though, with Japanese players attacking baseball like stoic gentleman warriors, practicing year-round through driving rain and bitter cold, prizing the man who fielded ground balls until his hands bled and treating umpires with exaggerated obeisance no matter how dreadful their decisions. The game quickly became very popular in Japan.

  In 1913 and again in 1922, professional American players visited Japan. John McGraw and Tris Speaker, the Boston Red Sox brilliant center fielder, were part of the first entourage, and among those in the second were the famous umpire George Moriarty and a former National League utility infielder named Herb Hunter. Accustomed to the churlish ways of American players, Moriarty spent a few innings in a place where athletes lowered their eyes and bowed to umpires, and was certain he’d seen Erewhon. Hunter saw opportunity.

  The Japanese knew nothing about the subtleties that make a superficially simple game yield endless complexities. They needed someone to teach them inside baseball: techniques, strategies, and psychology. Hunter reasoned that American major league players and managers would make excellent instructors. Acting as a conduit, Hunter traveled to Japan eight times between 1922 and 1932, and became known as “baseball’s ambassador.” In 1931, the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun sought to cash in on the growing Japanese baseball craze by asking Hunter to assemble an American all-star team for an exhibition game tour against Japanese college teams. Collectively, the American team, which included Mickey Cochrane, Lou Gehrig, and Lefty O’Doul, hit .346 in 17 games. The next year Hunter brought not another all-star squad to pummel Japanese pitching, but three players to offer what amounted to baseball seminars at Japanese universities. Hunter hired O’Doul, the National League batting champion, to help with hitting, fielding, and base running; Ted Lyons to work with the pitchers; and Moe Berg to teach the catchers.

  By the time the ship had reached Honolulu, Berg was already exulting to his family: “I am having a truly marvelous time—linguistically, sociologically, ethnologically, legally, and athletically.” While in Hawaii, he looked at volcanoes, went for a seaplane ride, and watched the undulating hips of a hula dancer, to which he reacted as prudishly as he had to Parisian coquettes. “They tell me the hula is a sacred religious rite,” he wrote, “but it looks like a vulgar ‘come hither’ dance to me.”

  Berg spent a good deal of his two and a half weeks aboard ship seated on deck or in his cabin, memorizing a small red Japanese grammar book, and when he got off the boat, he looked up at the signs along the teeming streets and knew what some of them said. Yakyu-kai, a Japanese newspaper, declaring that Berg was “a genius in language,” said that he read through six elementary school textbooks during his less than two-month-long visit. He didn’t, as the American sports press later liked to claim for him, become fluent in the space of a trans-Pacific voyage, but what is true is that in a short time he grasped more Japanese than most American expatriates or tourists could speak, and learned to write some characters in katakana, Japan’s phonetic written alphabet. His effort alone delighted his hosts, who referred to him as “Scholar Berg, the Linguist.”

  On October 20, Berg, Lyons, O’Doul and his wife, and Hunter and his wife docked at Yokohama Harbor. Two days later the ballplayers began their circuit of Meiji, Waseda, Rikkyo, Teidai (Tokyo Imperial), Hosei, and Keio universities, the members of Tokyo’s Six-University League. Towering over the Japanese ballplayers, the Americans spent five or six days at each school, teaching the finest baseball players in Japan to defend situations when runners are at first and third, to hit outside pitches behind a base runner so as to advance him into scoring position, and to confuse batters by varying pitch selection and location. Berg enjoyed coaching, but mostly he regarded it as an excuse to explore Japan, and what he saw of this most highly ritualized of societies left him feeling, of all things, insouciant.

  Life in this new place where even the mundane—beds, clothing, food—was unlike anything he’d seen before, immediately fascinated him much in the way that Paris had. “I have never enjoyed a visit or anything more in my life than this one,” he told his family on November 9. Japan was “a page out of a dream—streets, narrow, lined with shops, thousands of people going home from work on bicycles.” He slept on a tatami mat, wore a kimono, read English-language newspapers, strolled past the fancy shops along the Ginza—he called it the Ginzberg—survived two mild earthquakes and a typhoon, stood in a crowd with thousands of Japanese for a glimpse of the emperor, and ate sushi with chopsticks and the attendant cacophony of appreciation good manners required. “You must inhale it with the noise of a steel-mill at full blast, sound your p’s and q’s, dot your i’s and cross your t’s and then when the food or drink has passed your gullet, you exhale a sound of satisfaction,” he explained in a letter home.

  He even made mild mischief. The three American ballplayers were dining in a restaurant one day when O’Doul became frustrated by the waitress’s inability to understand his order. Berg scribbled something on a napkin and quietly handed it to her. “O’Doul ees ugliest mug I have ever seen,” she read aloud from his katakana. “
He ees also lousy baseball player. Someday he weel get heet with fly ball and get keeled.”

  He also attended a geisha party and afterward managed to maintain the acquaintance of three geisha girls, who served him dinner and accompanied him to plays. He liked one of them best, was perhaps even infatuated, and definitely tried to see her again when he returned two years later. She refused, telling him she was married.

  At Meiji, Berg had become fast friends with an English teacher named Takizo Matsumoto. Matsumoto asked Berg to call him Taki or Frank, and to teach his class. Berg did, and so successfully that soon other professors and even the presidents of Meiji and Imperial universities heard about him and expressed interest in meeting with him to discuss Japanese difficulties in learning foreign languages. Berg was intrigued by the Japanese inability to pronounce the English letter “l,” and he spent some time designing a means of using katakana to combat what he later referred to as “the ‘l’ problem.”

  After completing his coaching assignment in late November, Berg parted from the other Americans, heading off with Matsumoto to see some of the country. They traveled by train to Nara, where Berg played with the tame local deer, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, and Beppu, where he and Matsumoto were photographed together, wearing kimonos. Berg, curious about everything and unaccustomed to being in a place where he couldn’t communicate, was studying Japanese continually. Matsumoto helped him with it and, in exchange, Berg taught him some French.

  Vowing to stay in touch with Matsumoto, Berg pressed on alone through Manchuria, which the Japanese had invaded, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo much to Chinese—and American—displeasure. “Don’t fear—safe,” he told his parents, and despite the Japanese soldiers he saw swarming everywhere outside his train windows, it was. He toured Shanghai and Peking; stood at the Great Wall, which struck him as more futile than magnificent; and then went on to Indochina, where the snug skirts with long slits up the side worn by fashionable women in Saigon caught his attention, as did the rickshaw drivers, who seemed to him “satisfied to be beasts of burden.” After a day of touring the ancient stupas and spires of Angkor Wat, reclaimed from the Cambodian jungle—“the most thrilling sight I saw in the Orient”—he slept in a bed raised six feet off the ground to avoid snakes.

  Berg saw as much as he did because he was an enthusiastic walker, undaunted by the sweltering Southeast Asia heat. In Siam, however, he was told it was mating season for “Mr. Tiger,” as the Thais put it, so he did without his accustomed evening strolls and also declined an invitation to go tiger hunting. By New Year’s Eve he was in Bangkok, a seasoned and carefree traveler. “I am always meeting people and leave them or have their company as I please,” he told his parents. For Moe Berg, moving briskly across a fascinating landscape without obligation or connection was life at its best.

  The trip continued through India and the Middle East. “I have decided to see it all … may never have the chance to see it again” was his reasoning when he petitioned his parents for some extra funds. He climbed a pyramid in Egypt, wearing his black necktie; crossed the Sea of Galilee; stood by the shores of the River Jordan, walked in the valley of Jehoshaphat; and made it to Berlin by January 30. The city was clogged with Nazis; Hitler had just become German chancellor. A few weeks later Berg passed through Newark, where he distributed kimonos, chopsticks, geta (formal wooden shoes), and, for his mother, a lamp. It was clear to his brother, Dr. Sam, who received a kimono, that “Moe was dying to go back to Japan.” Instead, by February 26, he was in Biloxi, Mississippi, for spring training with the Senators. It had been the happiest few months of his life.

  Still preoccupied with Asia as Berg must have been while riding an American train through the Delta crescent, he was no doubt gratified that he did not to have to think about scrapping for a catching job that year. Although the Senators had two other catchers, Luke Sewell, the starter, and Cliff Bolton, a raw, cigar-chomping rookie, Berg’s value was proven. Of course in baseball, all jobs are ephemeral. In Biloxi, the Post described Berg hard at work, teaching Bolton the fundamentals of catching as “a rather poignant example of pure Christian unselfishness and Christian charity being given down here by a Jewish gentleman named Moe Berg.… Don’t you see that as soon as Bolton is good enough—Moe goes?” Implicit was that Berg was no longer a young athlete but a codger whose job depended upon his wiles. That he was only thirty suggested as much about the ephemeral nature of a baseball career as it did about the impression Berg left with baseball people. He was ceded an avuncular role in the game in part because he really was savvy and also because he always did seem a little older than his years.

  The year 1933 was a triumphant season for the pennant-winning Senators and an unobtrusive one for Berg. He batted 65 times, hit a squalid .185, and played in only 40 games. Even at the ballpark, his mind was drifting. Seated in the bull pen, he enlivened the long summer afternoons by spinning tales of the East for the relief pitchers. “Japan was the main subject; he loved it,” said Tommy Thomas, then also with Washington. On trains, while his teammates played cards, Berg sat alone, reading. Besides holding newspapers, the extra suitcase he lugged with him was stuffed with scientific magazines, a chessboard, and plenty of books, including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. As a rule, Berg eschewed fiction, but for a time he could be found poring over Carroll and a chessboard, attempting to work out a more logical sequence of moves for Alice’s mad chess game.

  A new member of the Senators that year was the talented and temperamental left-handed pitcher Earl Whitehill, who was married to Violet Linda Oliver, the California Raisin Girl. During spring training, Cronin, now the team’s “boy” manager, asked Berg if he would room with Whitehill on road trips. “If we’re going to win a pennant, we need harmony” was Cronin’s reasoning. Berg agreed, all the while thinking “that Earl’d make fun of one suitcase filled with clothes and the other with books. But it worked out satisfactorily.… Whitehill wound up by winning us a pennant. Also by carrying my bags. Both of them.”

  Earl Whitehill won a career-high 22 games, and on Ladies’ Day, September 21, the Senators defeated the Browns to win the pennant. As the last out was recorded, the handsome Cronin sprinted for the clubhouse, a delirious crowd of women shrieking at his heels in what the Post called “the weirdest hare-and-hound fan-ballplayer chase ever witnessed.” Berg didn’t play that day, but on the Ladies’ Days when he was in the lineup, Berg mugged for the crowd by circling under foul pop flies, tossing his mask in the air, and catching the ball with his glove and the mask with his bare hand.

  The 1953 World Series against the Giants was decidedly less dramatic for the Senators than clinching the pennant had been. Whitehill’s six-hit shutout in game three was Washington’s lone victory in the five-game series. Berg didn’t budge from the bench, as Sewell caught every inning.

  CLIFF BOLTON HAD hit .410 as a pinch hitter for the Senators in 1933, and when Griffith sent him a contract that winter, offering an $800 raise, Bolton, who’d asked for more than twice that, chomped down on his cigar and refused to leave High Point, North Carolina. Holdouts were rare at the time, and thought to be dangerous for players, but Bolton was stubborn. So was Griffith, and when Sewell broke his finger in a spring training game, Washington was left to defend its pennant with Moe Berg as its starting catcher and Eddie Phillips and Elmer “Yahoo” Klumpp backing him up.

  Berg was serene that spring. The Senators players were billeted right on the Gulf of Mexico in the posh Hotel Biloxi, and Mildred Cronin remembers walking into the sun parlor one evening to find Berg all alone with a large sheet of paper spread out before him on a table. When she asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was translating hieroglyphics.

  On April 22, Berg went 3–4 as the Senators defeated the Athletics. He also made an error, his first fielding mistake since 1932. He had played 117 consecutive errorless games, breaking Ray Hayworth’s American League record. Hardly anyone noticed. The team, meanwhile, had fallen into a pattern, winni
ng a game or two, and then losing a pair. On May 5 came a scare when the talented rookie infielder Cecil Travis was struck on the skull by a pitch. But he would recover soon, return to the lineup, and hit .319. Phillips was doing most of the catching by then, and it was Travis’s strong impression that this was fine with Berg. “He was studying all the time, more so than he was interested in baseball. He dressed up more than the rest of us.” Travis didn’t know quite what to make of Berg, and neither did anybody else in the ball club. “He was a private person, he didn’t go out, he didn’t converse,” says Calvin Griffith. “We didn’t know if he had dates with women.”

  Diane Roberts, Berg’s pretty young neighbor at the Wardman Park hotel, says he did, although not with her. “I wasn’t interested in Moe,” she says. “I was just a playgirl. I had a different date every night. He was having an affair with the wife of a doctor in the hotel. He didn’t seem to have many affairs with women. I asked him once why he didn’t marry and he said he didn’t have time. He was kind of a loner. You had to pry him open like an oyster.” Berg was a loyal friend to Roberts in 1934. She had begun a romance with a young diplomat from Santo Domingo, who drowned. Berg heard about the accident at the ballpark. “Moe came to visit and said, ‘You need a long walk.’ We walked over the Connecticut Avenue bridge above Rock Creek Park. He began telling me about the stars. It was a good night to see a few.”

  Washington’s embassies were always hosting fancy parties where the free food and drink and the well-dressed single women were all in plentiful supply. Charm and language skills are as useful as a silk evening jacket at such affairs, and Berg, who had both in spades, negotiated the diplomatic party circuit with considerable success. Yet sometimes what seemed suave to him struck others as rude. The American Bar Association was having its annual meeting that summer in Washington at the Mayflower Hotel. One day, instead of attending another meeting, J. Kemp Bartlett, an attorney from Baltimore, decided to take his teenage daughter Marjory to the Senators game. He hailed a taxi, and as the Bartletts settled into the rear seat, the front door on the passenger’s side opened and a young man stuck his head in. “Mr. Griffith’s Stadium, did you say you’re going to Mr. Griffith’s Stadium?” he asked, climbing in. “We were surprised, my father annoyed,” Marjory remembers, but they permitted the man to stay. The stranger tried to make a little conversation. “He asked Daddy if he was in the Bar Association. Daddy said yes. The man said, ‘I’m a lawyer too.’ Daddy said, ‘Hummph.’ We rode in silence out to the ballpark. When we got there, the door opened, the man sprang out, said ‘Thank you very much,’ and disappeared into the crowd. This was the Depression. I said, ‘Daddy, he left without paying his share.’ Daddy gave me a withering look and said, ‘That kind never does.’ ” The Bartletts’ seats were near first base and close to the field. During the game, a pop fly was hit in their direction. The catcher threw off his mask and scrambled after it. “I gasped and said, ‘Daddy, that’s the man in the cab with us.’ Daddy said, ‘Hummm. I knew perfectly well he wasn’t a lawyer.’ ” Of course, Moe Berg was a lawyer, as Marjory would come to know well over time.