The Catcher Was a Spy is a biography of the fascinating, 20th century Renaissance man Moe Berg. Berg was as complicated as they come: Ivy League-educated but not terribly fond of working, a professional athlete known for his intelligence and bookishness, a spy who both pleased and frustrated his handlers.
Berg's life really comes in three parts. From his birth in 1902 until the end of his professional career in 1939, his life was baseball. He played as a child, was a standout shortstop at Princeton University, and was a professional catcher for more than 15 years. Most of those years he spent as a third-string backup, known more for his degree (in linguistics) and his reading habits (multiple newspapers every day) than his batting average. The famous quote was that Moe Berg could speak a dozen languages, but he couldn't hit in any of them.
At the start of World War II, Berg's second life began: as a spy for the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. Berg's intellect and language abilities had him traversing throughout South America and Europe, and he was eventually given the important task of determining whether the Germans had developed a nuclear weapon.
Berg's third life, the 25 years that happened after the war, are far more complicated and confusing. As someone with his intelligence, background and pedigree, he could have been any number of things: a baseball coach, a professional spy, a lawyer, a college professor, even a reporter for one of those newspapers he held in such high regard. Instead he did...nothing. Legitimately, nothing. He bounced from acquaintance to acquaintance, accepting their gifts of room, board and food for days, weeks or even months at a time before moving on to the next friend. When there weren't friends around, he stayed with his brother or sister. And that's what he did, reliving the glory days, until he died in 1972.
I went into this book expecting to like Moe Berg. I'm a sports person, but I'm also a nerd and I always appreciate smart athletes who embrace their inner nerd. A baseball player, who was also a spy? Who was crazy smart but also loved sports? This guy had my name written all over him. But instead, I found him kind of infuriating. The last few years of his life were so wasted and for the simple reason that no job seemed good enough for him after his time as a spy. And after the OSS disbanded, he burned bridges at the CIA by spending their money lavishly on dinners and hotels and fine things in Europe and not keeping track of why any of it was necessary. So he just did nothing. The whole last 25 years of his life was telling and retelling and retelling stories from his first two lives: his success at Princeton, playing baseball with Babe Ruth in Japan, sneaking to the top of a hospital in Japan to get scene photographs (that he claimed helped the U.S. plan attacks on Japan during WWII).
Berg was clearly a complicated guy and the way Nicholas Dawidoff chose to tell the story is unique. He tells it as unbiased as possible - just the facts, thank you. But the final chapter questions just what made Berg tick. Was it his father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who shunned his religion and wanted his children to be proud professionals? His two oldest paid attention: Sam was a doctor and Ethel gave up her love of entertaining to be a schoolteacher. But Moe stuck with baseball, which forever irked his dad.
Another theory was his discomfort at being Jewish. If he was unique in other ways (the smart baseball player, the baseball-playing spy), people wouldn't think of him as the token Jew.
Yet another theory was that he was so far in the closet, he didn't know what he wanted. Moe never married and the closest he got was a long relationship with a woman he kind of forgot about during WWII. Other than her, he claimed to fall in love with and propose to a couple of other women, which surprised them as they didn't even know they were dating Berg at the time. And then there are the stories of him getting a little too touchy-feely with underage girls. Some people claim Moe was very much gay, while others point out that he slept with several women. My favorite quote from this section is from the professional baseball player who said that Berg couldn't be gay, since he himself was alone with Berg many times, giving him ample opportunities, and he never ONCE hit on him. If that's the case, every single guy I went to high school and college with was gay. Amazing!
There are psychologists giving their theories about Berg but one thing is pretty obvious. He was one of those people who was so insecure - whether because of his father or his religion or his sexuality or a psychological condition - that he masked in a cloak of narcissism. It got worse as he got older and he would walk out of the room if someone asked him a question or tried to tell their own stories.
So, I didn't like Moe Berg as much as I thought I would. But I did like the book, which was incredibly well researched and written. It must have been difficult to look into the life of a guy like Berg, who was so open with certain stories but so closed in other ways. I'm glad Dawidoff did.
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