Moe Berg, catcher and spy, gets an exhibit in Baseball Hall of Fame
The shrine to the national pastime in Cooperstown, New York, recently opened an exhibit on the Jewish player, who gained more attention for his espionage than a 15-year career in sport.
By JTAMoe Berg (photo credit: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
Moe Berg is going into the Baseball Hall of Fame – as a spy, not a catcher.The shrine to the national pastime in Cooperstown, New York, recently opened an exhibit on the Jewish player, who gained more attention for his espionage than a 15-year career in which he finished with a batting average of .243 and six home runs.Berg, following his baseball days in the 1920s and ’30s, worked for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS — a precursor to the CIA. He went on missions in then-Yugoslavia, where he tracked resistance groups, and Italy, where he interviewed physicists about the German nuclear program.The Cooperstown exhibit, titled “Moe Berg: Big League Spy,” looks at his exploits in both worlds through baseball artifacts and wartime documents.A New Yorker who spoke more than 10 languages (seven fluently) and graduated from Princeton, Berg was the subject of the film “The Catcher Was a Spy,” released in June. Jewish actor Paul Rudd portrayed Berg, who died in 1972 at 70.
