To Catch (but not hit) a Spy

Welcome to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week we present yet another of our award-winning Dollop-style in-season bonus installments, as Ed unveils the remarkably strange but true story of one Morris “Moe” Berg. Located directly at the three-way intersection of baseball mediocrity, higher education and international espionage, Ed’s chronology of Berg’s life and times render his Collective brethren floored well before even the halfway mark. Join us for the narrative of baseball’s fourth greatest non-Gentile catcher, an adult life that commences with a pair of Ivy League degrees, followed by a professional baseball career that though otherwise feeble somehow spans nearly two decades across the AL, NL and Japan, before reaching his life’s apex mountain in “retirement,” both as the Ken Jennings of the radio age and as an agent of the CIA-predecessor Office of Strategic Services involved in increasingly consequential and delicate situations in Eastern Europe. Labeled “difficult” by direct kin, fluent in seven languages but unable to hit in any of them, for a time confused with a celebrity comedic ignoramus sharing the same forename, and later portrayed on film by Phoebe Buffay’s husband, Moe Berg’s life was one of achievement academically, athletically and in service to his country, while also providing we, the Bill Bradley Collective, with a great bit of posthumous humor this week. Berg homered six (6!) times over the span of a fifteen-year MLB career, and yet it takes Ed a mere forty minutes to hit Moe’s story out of the park.