Morris Berg was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball. He later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Berg played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams. He was never more than an average player and was better known for being ‘the brainiest guy in baseball’
About Moe Berg in brief
Morris Berg was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball. He later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Berg played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams. He was never more than an average player and was better known for being ‘the brainiest guy in baseball’ Berg was the third and last child of Bernard Berg, a pharmacist, and his wife Rose, a homemaker, both Jewish, who lived in the Harlem section of New York City, a few blocks from the Polo Grounds stadium. After the war, Berg was occasionally employed by the OSS’s successor, the Central Intelligence Agency. By the mid-1950s, he was unemployed. During the last two decades of his life, he had no work and lived with various siblings. He died of a heart attack at the age of 80. He is buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery in New York, where he was a member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for more than 30 years. He also served as the president of the New York Hebrew Congregation, which was founded by his great-great-grandfather, Abraham Joshua Heschel, in the late 1800s. Berg was a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He spoke several languages and regularly read 10 newspapers a day. His reputation was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz show Information, Please, in which he answered questions about the etymology of words and names from Greek and Latin. He had studied seven languages: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, studying with the philologist Harold H.
Bender. His Jewish heritage and modest finances combined to keep him on the fringes of Princeton social life. He never quite fit in. Berg’s first game with the Brooklyn Robins was on June 27, 1923, against the Philadelphia Phillies at the Baker Bowl. The Giants were especially interested, but they already had two shortstops, Dave Bancroft and Travis Jackson, who were future Hall of Famers. Berg came in at the start of the seventh inning replacing the shortstop at the shortstop, when Berg replaced Baker Olson at shortstop. Berg had an outstanding day, getting two hits in four at bats with a single and a double, and several marvelous plays, to appeal to the large Jewish community in NYC. On June 27,. 1923, Berg signed his first big league contract for USD 5,000, when he replaced the shortstop when Baker Olson, who was at the pitcher’s mound at the time, was out of the game. Berg never again referred to having attended NYU for a year, presenting himself exclusively as a Princeton man. He received a B. A., magna cum laude in modern languages. In his senior season,. he was captain of the team and had a. 337 batting average, batting. 611 against Princeton’s arch-rivals, Harvard and Yale. Berg and Crossan Cooper, Princeton’s second baseman, communicated plays in Latin when there was an opposing player on second base. He played first base on an undefeated team.
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