The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

As Nicholas Dawidoff portrays him, Berg was a bizarre man who spent the final 25 years of his life essentially homeless, living off the charity of friends and family, trading his stories of pre-war baseball and wartime espionage for the offer of clean clothes, hot meals, and warm water for a bath. Trained in the law, and a skilled linguist who spoke half a dozen languages, he refused all employment, apart from the rare consulting job or intelligence mission.

While most print accounts of Berg make extravagant claims about his World War II espionage, Dawidoff boils everything down to what he can find on paper from the CIA (and its precursor agencies). The truth, as reported here, is that Berg's probing of German atomic secrets in 1945 was vital to the war effort, but that he hardly ever worked as a spy again. He simply pretended to be one, while remaining cloaked in an increasingly insular lifestyle.

The research for "The Catcher Was a Spy" is impeccable. Dawidoff interviewed hundreds of sources, and as a result the book's index is clogged with famous names -- athletes or otherwise (not too many other books quote both Ted Williams and Albert Einstein). However, most sources knew Berg only tangentially, and I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth to the index and the (extensive) footnotes to keep track of who was saying and thinking each particular passage.

The end result is a finely detailed psychoanalysis of Moe Berg, who passed away more than 20 years before this biography was written. Lots of secondary sources (and their opinions, in many cases, of a man they met for 2 or 3 days, half a century previous) are cited, as are many of Berg's private journals and letters. What no-one knows, however, including the author himself, is what Moe Berg really thought. Therefore Dawidoff spents a lot of time telling us what "Berg must have known", or "would have believed". For example, Berg was a non-practicing Jew who rarely mentioned the Holocaust, and Dawidoff is forced to fill in the gaps with auhorial speculation. Other speculations (on homosexuality, death by poisoning, and child molestation) seem forced or unnecessary.

"The Catcher Was A Spy" is often heavy going, as it seems to require equal knowledge of baseball, nuclear physics, and abnormal psychology. I found the account of Berg's postwar meanderings to be the most exciting material, although I wish these had been arranged chronologically rather than geographically. On the whole, I recommend the book, and wish that Berg had left behind a completed biography of his own. He had so many stories to tell.


Skullduggery, twisted mentalities, wartime brutality ...   March 26, 2001
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

The skullduggery of spies; the warped mental state of the homeless vagabond, Jewish concerns in the war, and baseball on top of all that!

Great reading.


The catcher was a freeloader.   June 10, 2000
 6 out of 8 found this review helpful

Nicholas Dawidoff deserves commendation for following through with a supremely difficult assignment: telling the life story of a man who never divulged personal details to anyone, friend or relative. The picture he paints is surprisingly sympathetic, given that the overall impression that comes from the book's last hundred pages is one of Berg the layabout, trading on people's fondness for him as a way to avoid making a living. He comes across as tremendously unpleasant, with his extensive list of personal peccadilloes, one suit of clothes, washed daily, and assumption that his stories were so entertaining that he could spin them for the thousandth time rather than render compensation for meals, overnight stays, books and anything else he consumed. Dawidoff hammers home the point that Berg had a uniquely engaging personality, in essence charming the pants off of nearly everyone he met. It must be true, because in this fascinating book, he seems merely an aggravating boor.


Strange Man, Great Story   June 8, 2000
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I came across this book in a bookstore and was immediately intrigued. I had just finished bios on Ted Williams and Rogers Hornsby. This was a very different story. Moe Berg was not a great baseball player. He was a backup catcher who bounced around the majors for a number of years. Because he played alongside Babe Ruth, Eddie Collins, Ted Williams, etc., the book contains a number of great baseball anecdotes.

The real fascination here, of course, is Moe Berg's life inside and outside of baseball. "The Catcher was a Spy" tells the story of a complex man who could have been a decent baseball player but found himself more interested in reading a dozen newspapers a day. Whether he actually became a "spy" during the war is questionable. He did do extensive travelling in Japan and Europe in the Forties spending time with such notables as Albert Einstein.

As Moe Berg slows down after the war, so does the book. He becomes a wanderer relying on old friends to take him in for a few weeks at a time. You get the sense that this was an intelligent and kind man who had great potential. At the same time, Moe Berg was a very odd individual. This of course is what makes the book a great read.