By Michael Feldberg

He was a living university in a baseball uniform. He loved the game and was a smart ballplayer. That's why I wanted him on my team. He had a great influence on a club, knew how to handle men. Moe was the only man I know of who could sit on the bench for two months, then be brought into a game and catch perfectly. I would wave him in from the bullpen. Moe would approach me in the dugout and ask if the rules of the game were still the same and if everyone still got three strikes due them. Then, with a big smile on his face, he would get behind the plate hollering encouragement to the players.

Joe Cronin, Hall of Fame manager, recalling Moe Berg

Joe Cronin managed Moe Berg for two teams, the Washington Senators and the Boston Red Sox. An intelligent man himself, Cronin had great respect for Moe’s education and erudition. In this quotation, however, Cronin indicates why he respected Moe so much as a ballplayer.

Moe was a “good baseball man.” This is not necessarily the same thing as a being a good baseball player, although some good players are also good baseball men. The term indicates that an individual has proven himself by hanging around the game for a long time as a player, coach, manager or front office executive. He respects the game and sees it as being bigger than himself or his particular team. He understands there is a “right way” and a “wrong way” to play the game. After the Black Sox Scandal in the 1919 World Series, the integrity of the game took on special importance, and while it became acceptable to cut corners and break rules to win, a good baseball man would never allow himself to be associated with failing to make an effort or consort with individuals who might be involved in gambling professionally on games.

When Moe was an active player, baseball was truly the America’s pastime. Other sports could not compete for fan loyalty and devotion. Baseball franchise owners had a moral and civic responsibility to try to make their teams successful. Players had to shoulder the burden of carrying a community’s hopes and aspirations. The baseball is long, fun to follow if your team is winning and depressing if it is not. Good baseball men know how to survive the rhythmic swings of a season and a career, how to carry their fans’ hopes, how to balance the booing against the cheers.

Cronin enjoyed having Moe on his team because, as a good baseball man, Moe was not a prima donna who demanded playing time or special treatment. Moe was content to sit on the bench or serve as bullpen catcher, warming up the relief pitchers out of sight, 350 feet from home plate. Yet, when called upon to perform in a game, Moe usually did so flawlessly. At one point in his career, Moe held the record for most consecutive games played as a catcher without an error (117). Yet, it took Moe three seasons to accumulate those 117 games. Moe was his team’s starting catcher for only one season. Yet, because of his ability to be a good baseball man, he made the roster of five different major league teams over fifteen seasons.

While Moe Berg is best remembered for being the brainiest man in baseball – “a living university in a baseball uniform,” as Cronin put it – he is probably underappreciated as a member of the baseball community.

This week’s “Moe Berg Quote of the Week” is the well-known reflection on Moe by Casey Stengel, who called Moe “the strangest fellah ever to put on a uniform.” That’s not all Casey had to say. Here’s the full quote.

Now, I tell ya. I mean Moe Berg was as smart a ballplayer as ever came along. Knew the legs wouldn’t cooperate in the infield and when the catching job opened up he grabs a mask and puts it on and there he was. Guy never caught a game in his life and then goes behind the plate like Mickey Cochran. Now that’s something’. But, I’ll tell ya again, nobody ever knew his life’s history. I call him the mystery catcher. Strangest fellah ever to put on a uniform.

Stengel summed up Moe about as well as anyone could in just a paragraph. Of course, he was only referring to Moe the ballplayer. Not Moe the linguist, the Princeton Ian, the Jew from Newark, the World War II spy.

Not the same Moe Berg who graduated from Columbia Law School and attended the Sorbonne. Not the man who collected newspapers.

Or the one who never had a home of his own.

How strange Moe was exceeds anything Casey might have imagined. This blog and this website are dedicated to preserving Moe Berg’s memory. But this is also a place to portray Moe in the round, to deconstruct his legend and explore the complexity of this puzzling figure.

Moe said of his reputation as a spy for the United States, “Were I not a ballplayer there would have been no talk at all." Any consideration of his continuing ability to fascinate generation after generation of Americans (and Japanese) begins with the fact of his long career in major league baseball (1923, 1926-1939).

By most measures, Moe was a mediocre to inadequate ballplayer. His statistics, the standards most players are judged by, are below average.

Source: Harold U. Ribalow and Meir Z. Ribalow, Jewish Baseball Stars, pp. 147-170.

Despite these numbers, Berg managed to hold a roster spot for all those seasons, well beyond the career expectancy of most players, even good ones. What was his secret?

I’m sure anyone who has read Nick Dawidoff’s biography of Moe, or any of the other half-dozen books on his life, has their own opinion about why Moe holds our attention, continues to hold “cult figure” status.

What’s your view?