Moe Berg: Rocking the unibrow.

Morris “Moe” Berg wasn’t a particularly distinguished major league catcher, but he was one thing that Yogi Berra, Elston Howard and Josh Gibson never were–a spy for the U.S. government. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School who spoke numerous languages and had a profound intellectual curiosity, Berg was a spy for the Offices of Strategic Services during WWII. He was also the player that the king of the oddballs Casey Stengel once labeled as “the strangest man in baseball.”

Nicholas Davidoff wrote a really good book about the brainy athlete’s shadowy work called The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg in 1994. Davidoff notes on the back cover of the book that Berg is the only former major leaguer to have his baseball card on display at CIA headquarters. An excerpt from the chapter entitled “You Never Knew He Was Around”:

“Moe Berg had always been a loner, and as he receded to the fringes of professional baseball, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Nobody had really ever known much about him. Now he became obviously unusual, and it began to occur to some people to wonder….

An eager conversationalist, even garrulous at times, Berg could be very funny. Yet for the flow of talk, he kept himself to himself. He was as gray as the front page, and he behaved like a newspaper, too; all the latest facts, but no reflections. ‘We knew a lot about [ballplayers’] private lives,’ says Shirley Povich, ‘but he was mysterious. You never saw him hanging around the hotel lobby like other ballplayers. They just accepted Moe for what he was–a man apart.’ The game ended and Berg showered, dressed and disappeared. ”

Other Recent Sports Posts:

• Gleaned: Major League Baseball All-Star Masks
• A better NFL overtime fix.
• Chess champion Magnus Carlsen is a highly self-aware kid.
• The birth of jogging in America.
• The eccentric Texan who built the Astrodome.