Moe Berg as a catcher for the Washington Senators, Sept. 6, 1933. Photo courtesy of Stanley Weston/Getty Images from the Baseball Hall of Fame exhibit of 2018.
SARATOGA SPRINGS–Saratoga Jewish Community Arts, will present a panel discussion of the film “The Catcher was a Spy,” based on the true story of baseball player Moe Berg. The Zoom presentation is set for Oct. 13 at 7 p,m.
On Dec. 18, 1944, a 42-year-old man masquerading as a Swiss physics student, settled his 6-foot 1inch frame into a chair in a Zurich lecture hall. Instead of simply listening to the brilliant insights offered by the physicist at the podium, he was trying to understand enough of the scientist’s German to identify key words —words that could change, or perhaps even destroy the world. The attendee wasn’t a student, he was a retired baseball player named Morris (Moe) Berg. The American government wanted him to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, director of the Nazi nuclear program, dubbed “the most dangerous possible German in the field” of physics.
Born on March 2, 1902, in Harlem, N.Y., Berg was the youngest child of Bernard Berg, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant and his wife Rose. While all their children attended college and went on to professional careers, Berg was the most intellectually gifted of the three. He studied modern language at Princeton where he was one of the few Jewish students in the class of 1923. He earned a law degree from Columbia, took graduate-level courses at the Sorbonne in Paris and even worked at a New York law firm. He claimed varying degrees of proficiency in at least six languages, but his true passion was baseball.
Berg played 16 seasons for five professional teams and posted a respectable batting average of .243 over 1813 at-bats. Casey Stengel described him as “the strangest man ever to play baseball.” John Keeran, a former sports columnist for the New York Times called him, “the most scholarly athlete I ever knew.”
Phyllis Wang, coordinator of SJCA has said, “for the United States, Berg was an unexceptional baseball player but a most exceptional spy.”
Advance registration is required. Registration and information on future SJCA programs may be obtained at the SJCA Home Page, https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/9sNCnAJ/CatcherwasaSpy. A playbill and Zoom link will be sent to registrants a few days before the program.
