Another person who met Berg that summer was Frank Slocum. Slocum’s father was a roving reporter for the New York American. One day in Chicago, with Washington in town to play the White Sox, Slocum took young Frank up to Berg’s room in the Del Prado Hotel for a moment. Slocum grew up to become a baseball reporter himself, and later assistant to the commissioner. That brief glimpse of Berg stayed with him, because in over five decades with the game, it was the only time he shook hands with a ballplayer wearing a white kimono and nothing else.
Luke Sewell returned to the Senators in mid-June. Ten days later St. Louis pitcher Bump Hadley hit him in the head, putting him on the bench again. The catching disorder mirrored the team’s; the Senators dropped far behind Detroit, at one point losing 16 of 20 games. Something had to give, and it was Griffith. On July 25, with the Post reporting that “the Nats catching staff has been one of the chief drawbacks and contributors to the collapse of the club this season,” Bolton was summoned to Washington, and his demands were met. To clear space for him on the team roster, Griffith decided to cut Berg loose. This was done without consulting his manager, and when Cronin heard about it, he—“chipper as a lark denuded of its vocal chords” all season, according to Povich—was furious. Cronin argued that one Moe Berg was worth ten Cliff Boltons, but Griffith didn’t agree and gave Berg his unconditional release.
The retirement lasted four days. On August 1, Cleveland catcher Glenn Myatt broke his ankle sliding into a base, leaving the third-place Indians with only Frankie Pytlak to do the catching. The Cleveland manager was Berg’s old friend from Washington, Walter Johnson. Johnson offered the reserve catching job to Berg, and the Cleveland Jewish Independent was soon reporting that “the most erudite player in professional baseball is a member of the Cleveland Indians.”
Berg played sporadically through August. He made a spectacular one-handed catch of Hank Greenberg’s foul pop on August 10, and tripled against Whitehill on the seventeenth, but there was ample time for other pursuits, like baby-sitting for Johnson’s children. “Moe would take care of my sister and me, making sure we didn’t trip and fall,” says Caroline Johnson Thomas, ten that summer. “We had the run of the ballpark, and he made sure we didn’t get into areas where we’d get hurt. I’d imagine Dad asked Moe to do so. Moe gave my sister an ashtray with his autograph embossed on it.” In September, Pytlak injured himself, and Berg became the regular catcher. “He has performed in fine style, being largely responsible for the recent winning streak, which has practically clinched third place for the Tribe,” boasted the Jewish Independent. Berg had played well enough, but hitting .258 in 29 games was nothing spectacular.
His performance on the “Football Special” to Princeton Junction, however, was highly impressive. Back in New York, he and John Kieran rode the train together out from Manhattan to see a Princeton football game. Kieran had with him a fat, dog-eared Latin dictionary, which he and Berg fell upon like starving men. They traced the roots of English words from Latin, through French and Italian, into their modern English forms, and they examined prized quotations from Cicero, Caesar, Horace, and Virgil. As the train arrived in Princeton, Berg pleased Kieran immensely by saying, “Imagine wasting time and money in a nightclub when you can have fun like this.”
In October came Herb Hunter’s greatest coup. For years, the Japanese had been imploring to see Babe Ruth. Ruth had always been unavailable, but now, after his last—and worst—season with the Yankees, the aging Bambino agreed to participate in a 17-game exhibition tour of Japan against a Japanese all-star team. Along with Ruth, Hunter had arranged for a gaudy roster that included Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Earl Averill, Charlie Gehringer, and Lefty Gomez. Hunter took two catchers, Frankie Hayes of the Athletics and Moe Berg, a last-minute all-star selection. Rick Ferrell of the Red Sox had turned Hunter down, and when that happened, with departure looming, Hunter must have thought back to 1932, recalled how well received Berg had been, and extended the invitation. Berg, of course, was overjoyed.
BY 1934, JAPAN was openly at odds with the United States, seething, in fact, with what Edwin O. Reischauer called a “general sense of discontent.” Japan hadn’t liked it at all when the U.S. sought to place restrictions on the size of Japan’s naval fleet, and the frustration was exacerbated when American politicians condemned the Japanese incursions into China. The U.S. had grown powerful by extending its sphere of influence through Latin America; why could Japan not do the same in Asia? The notion that Washington, halfway across the world, wanted to be a player in the politics of the Pacific rim had led Tokyo to withdraw from the League of Nations and to double its military budget within four years. Avid reader of newspapers that he was, Berg must have been aware of Japan’s growing disaffection with the West. Beyond the ecstatic crowds that gathered for a glimpse of Babe Ruth, hostility and paranoia were everywhere.
In particular, there was a manic fear of spies stoked by a fierce newspaper war between several Japanese newspapers. To Japanese eyes, every Brownie-toting foreigner was suspect. “They come ostensibly as tourists but in reality as military observers,” warned one Japanese newspaper. “Despite the utmost vigilance of the police, the country is swarming with a particularly dangerous brand of spy,” cautioned another. An American entomologist studying Japanese beetles suddenly found himself embroiled in controversy when he was accused of using the insect studies as a cover to scout an air base. When the National City Bank of New York, which had offices in Osaka and Kobe, commissioned scenic photographs from those cities for display in its Manhattan headquarters, a month-long flap ensued.
Memos from bewildered State Department officials testify to the fact that the U.S. was not dispatching flocks of spies to Tokyo any more than the hapless entomologist was training his beetles to observe dive-bomber flight patterns. Japan’s fear of spies, however, accomplished at least two things. Among the Japanese, it created a sense of solidarity against invisible invaders. It also piqued at least one American visitor’s sense of adventure.
In addition to taking his personal effects, Berg boarded the Empress of Japan with a leather case containing a 16-mm Bell and Howell automatic movie camera; a letter from MovietoneNews, a New York City newsreel production firm with which he had contracted to film sights from his trip and which seems to have given him the camera; books on the Japanese language; and some cards he’d made, with Japanese transliterations of American baseball terms, such as first base, right-handed batter, double, and triple. The thirty-two-year-old Berg worked hard at the language on the boat, but study didn’t interfere with his social life. He liked to dance, and his tango and waltz partners included Ruth’s stylish eighteen-year-old daughter, Julia, and a tall, long-legged eighteen-year-old blonde named Peggy Boulton.
Raised by cautious, protective parents, Peggy was now on her way to spend a year with the family of her uncle, Herbert Marler, Canada’s minister to Japan. She had been accompanied to the boat, and her uncle would meet her in Yokohama, but across the ocean, she was on her own. High-spirited and very beautiful, she quickly became popular with the American ballplayers. Babe Ruth liked to toss silver dollars out over the ship’s pool and watch Peggy dive for them. Berg preferred to flirt with her mind.
Traveling alone abroad by passenger ship for the first time and spending your evenings separated by a champagne flute from a tall, dark storyteller with a soft laugh and manners to match is the sort of moonlit, irresistibly romantic interlude that a mother tells her daughter about over and over for the rest of their lives. “She became a mascot for the team,” says Peggy Boulton’s daughter Jane Lyons. “With Moe it became something deeper. Mother said that it was how different he was from other players, how he stood apart. He was cultured. He was an intellectual. It was sparkling and fun as could be.” It was also innocent, which is perhaps why, twenty years later, when Peggy Boulton Parsons ran into Berg at Union Station in Washington, they were unreservedly glad to see each other.
Berg’s peers in baseball saw the sort of effect he had on
people and envied him. “I wanted to be a person like Moe,” says Joe Cascarella. “All the other members of the team felt Moe was special and different from them. On the ship the other players played games or got drunk at the bar. Moe studied Japanese. After two weeks of sailing Moe could speak some Japanese, and Japanese people understood him. He spoke to regular citizens everywhere he went.”
Although Berg wasn’t completely fluent in Japanese, he was not above adding to his reputation as a quick study. In Vancouver, Ruth said to him, “You’re such a linguist; do you speak Japanese?”
“No, I never had occasion to learn it,” Berg answered. Two weeks later, on November 2, Berg greeted someone on the dock in Japanese.
“Wait a minute,” said Ruth. “You told me you didn’t speak Japanese.”
“That was two weeks ago,” came the reply. In later years, Berg would tell this story often, sometimes substituting Lefty Gomez for Ruth as his straight man.
Ruth had been in a malaise when he left the United States. Thirty-nine years old, with a body he’d lived in hard, the Bambino hoped to retire and manage a major league team, but none wanted him. Japan perked him up. Ruth arrived to find himself everywhere: on the cover of the program sold at ballparks; in newspaper headlines—“Babe Ruth, Sultan of Swat, Arrives,” bannered the Osaka Mainichi; and in milk chocolate advertisements. Everybody wanted to see and fête him, and so the Americans were rushed from appointment to appointment—to welcoming ceremonies in which players and politicians exchanged messages of friendship, to garden parties, teas, luncheons with royalty, and dinner dances, and to private tours of department stores, castles, Buddhist temples, and, inevitably, a geisha house. At the last, the subtleties of young women attired in layers of silken costume, shuffling across a room to perform ancient ritual ceremonies, were lost on Ruth. He pawed at one increasingly flustered woman every time she passed. Watching nearby, Berg wrote down some characters in katakana and handed them to Ruth’s victim. The next time she felt a large hand groping beneath her carefully tied obi, she paused, bowed, smiled sweetly, and said, “Fuck you, Babe Ruth.” That, Ruth understood.
But Berg was having it both ways. He and Lyons, as two of the single men on the excursion, were treated to an evening at a brothel. Berg wasn’t usually much of a tippler, but in filmed footage of this evening he looks plastered and engages in some public kissing and groping. Who knows what else transpired behind curtains?
At the ballpark, people waited in line for two days to become part of crowds of as many as 55,000. The Americans played 17 games in 12 Japanese cities against Japan’s first-ever professional team, a collection of former high school and college stars who called themselves the Tokyo Giants. The U.S. won every game. Late in the series, the American team went so far as to lend some of its players to the opposition to even things out a bit.
The competition may have been lopsided, but nobody was bored. There were elaborate pregame ceremonies in which young women gave the players bouquets of flowers. One contest was played on a field in Shizuoka, set near the foot of Mount Fuji and surrounded by fragrant tea plants. Another took place in a driving rainstorm in a stadium at Kokura. The stadium had no bleachers, and with an enormous crowd on hand to see Ruth, 11,000 spectators knelt behind the outfielders in hip-deep water. One fan walked 80 miles to see that game. He carried a samurai sword with him, which he ceremoniously awarded to Earl Averill, who hit the first home run of the day. This was not so much baseball as opéra bouffe, and Ruth was the undisputed basso profundo. Responding to the shouts of “Banzai Ruth!” that accompanied him wherever he went, he led the American regulars with a .408 batting average and 13 home runs. Babe Ruth, said Ambassador Grew, was worth one hundred ambassadors.
The closest the all-Japan team came to scratching out a win came at Shizuoka, where a eighteen-year-old flamethrower named Eiji Sawamura lost 1–0 to Earl Whitehill. Sawamura struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, and Charlie Gehringer, and the American players had abundant praise for him afterward. One U.S. team official even tried to lure him to the American majors. Sawamura demurred, however, and was killed in an airplane over Formosa during World War II.
Tragedy was close at hand, too. Five games were played at Shingu Stadium in Tokyo, which had been built as a shrine to honor emperor Meiji. With nascent fascism in Japan had come a large number of extreme nationalist societies. During the American tour, three members of the War God Society declared that Matsutoro Shoriki, the head of the Yomiuri newspaper and the producer of the trip, had defiled the Meiji shrine by permitting foreigners to play a foreign game on its sacred ground. In February, Shoriki was stabbed in the neck as he left his office.
And Moe Berg? He walked the penumbra. Berg appeared in six games and had two hits, fewer than anybody else on the team, including the pitchers. Berg didn’t object and neither did the Japanese. “He’s more a scholar than a baseball player,” explained one reporter. The Mizuno corporation consulted him about the manufacture of baseball gloves, and afterward presented him with a specially designed black kimono filigreed with red baseball designs and Berg’s name in Japanese. Meiji University asked him to deliver a speech, and Berg did, in English. “You have done us the honor of adopting our national game as yours,” he said. “There is no greater leveler, no greater teacher of humility than competitive sports, and I sincerely hope that our innocent junket through Japan will serve to bring the countries whom we represent unofficially closer together.” Speaking over Tokyo radio to the United States, he offered similar sentiments, concluding, “I hope an innocent adventure like ours will turn out to be a scoop of diplomacy without portfolio.”
Berg was always happy to pose for photographs, but this was the one occasion in his life where he displayed an interest in taking them himself. He took the camera almost everywhere he went, shooting scenes on American trains and ballplayers boarding the Empress in Vancouver, storms at sea and parties in Hawaii, Ruth dancing with his wife aboard ship and crowds greeting the boat in Yokohama. The camera went with him to ballparks in Japan, where he recorded his teammates at play, and on trips to Nikko, Hikone, Kamakura, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyoto. Through a train window he shot Mount Fuji in snow. Along the city streets he recorded women wearing traditional clothes, children playing juggling games, and the dense Tokyo traffic.
That Berg succeeded with this sort of behavior in a country obsessed about foreign spies is not as surprising as it might seem. Members of the expatriate community still traveled wherever they liked without incident. With politics what they were, things might have been different for American tourists, but tourists to Japan then were rare and, besides, Berg was no ordinary stranger but a celebrity guest whom nobody wanted to offend. Very few Japanese spoke any English, and for all the editorial bluster, Japanese policemen were leery of confronting foreigners with whom they could not communicate. Those who didn’t recognize the large American were disposed to let him be.
There were limits to this deference. Taking pictures of the Tsugaru Strait, separating Honshu and Hokkaido, for example, was forbidden by the Japanese military, and Ruth himself was inspected by police during the team’s crossing. Berg, however, had an uncanny ability to remain unobtrusive, to blend into the fabric of the moment. He was also fearless, and seemed to thrill at the idea of gathering sensitive material for his MovietoneNews travelogue during the crackdown on publicity. Berg may have heard Connie Mack say that he suspected that someone was listening in on his telephone conversations, but if he did, he wasn’t intimidated. Dark eyes glowing, camera held high, he photographed the Tsugaru Strait, and got away with it. Toward the end of the trip, he dared himself even further.
On November 29, in a game played at Omiya, the all-America team pasted the all-Japan team 23–5. Frankie Hayes caught the entire game, and Moe Berg didn’t play an inning. That was so much the ordinary that most of the American players failed to notice that Berg was missing. Those who did inquire about him were told that he was ill. In fact, his health was fine and Berg was twelve mi
les away, back in Tokyo. This man who genuinely loved Japan was preparing for the stunt of a lifetime—for a day, he was becoming Japanese.
Changing out of his oxford cloth suit and tie, Berg put on a kimono and a pair of geta, waved back his thick black hair, and parted it at the center. Under his arm he carried a bouquet of fresh flowers. So dressed, he headed for Saint Luke’s Hospital. In the Japan Advertiser there had been a notice that Elsie Lyon, Ambassador Grew’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, had just given birth to her first child, a daughter she named Alice. Berg had decided to pay Elsie and her new baby a visit.
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