Subject: Interesting Baseball Story
When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was included. Although he played with five major-league teams from 1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ballplayer. But Moe was regarded as thebrainiest ballplayer of all time.
In fact Casey Stengel once said: “That is the strangest man ever to play baseball.” When all the baseball stars went to Japan, Moe Berg went with them and many people wondered why he went with “the team.”
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth
The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a United States spy, working undercover
with the OSS/ CIA. Moe spoke 15 languages – including Japanese. And he had two loves: baseball
and spying. In Tokyo, garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an
American diplomat being treated in St. Luke’s Hospital – the tallest building in the Japanese capital.
He never delivered the flowers. The ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and filmed key features:
the harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc. Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied
Berg’s films in planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo.
Moe Berg
His father disapproved of his baseball career and never once watched his son play. In Barringer High School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and French. Moe read at least 10 newspapers every day.
He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton – having added Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver. During further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Columbia Law School, he picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hungarian – 15 languages in all, plus some regional dialects.