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Behind home plate and adversary lines: New documentary reveals Major League baseball player Moe Berg's transition from an Ivy League-educated catcher to a World War II-era spy tasked with infiltrating Germany's atomic bomb program
Moe Berg's story is chronicled in Aviva Kempner's new documentary, 'The Agent Behind Home Plate'
In the fall of 1934, a contingent of American baseball players including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx boarded a luxury cruise liner to Japan for a 12-city barnstorming tour.
Five similar tours had taken place in the increasingly baseball-obsessed nation since 1908, but the political climate was different in 1934. Japan had invaded the Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931, and by the mid-1930s, the tension across the Pacific was palpable.
To the Japanese, the tour was a chance to see the aging Ruth, who thrilled crowds with 13 house runs as the Americans went 18-0 against the All-Nippon team.
To the Americans, the games were more about goodwill. Players posed for pictures, exchanged pleasantries with esteemed members of Japanese society, and acknowledged rare gifts, such as vases, all while promoting the game and American culture.
Perhaps the most im
Morris “Moe” Berg was a Major League Baseball catcher for fifteen seasons. As a player, there was nothing truly remarkable about Berg yet his post-retirement from baseball productive for the Office of Strategic Services -a wartime intelligence agency of the United States during World War II- has cemented him as one the most fascinating players in baseball history. Unfortunately, director Ben Lewin’s (Please Upright By) bland adaptation of Nicholas Dawidoff‘s 1994 biography The Catcher was a Spy is a swing and a miss.
Set in 1944, The Catcher was a Spy follows Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) who finds himself in the crosshairs of retirement. Berg is unlike any other ballplayer of his time. He is an intellectual who graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law Academy who finds comfort in being in a library when he is not on the baseball field. Berg is also fluent in seven languages and unlike superstars such a Joe DiMaggio, the catcher was a mystery to the public. This catches the attention of the Office of Strategic Services –the predecessor of the CIA- who hires Berg to join the war effort. After existence dissatisfied with desk work, Berg is assigned to a potenti
Moe Berg is not exactly a household name among baseball fans. The catcher played 15 seasons for five different teams in the 1920s and 1930s, with a cumulative batting average of .243. His best weapon was his brain, as he was a heady backstop recruited by his manager to serve as a coach for the Boston Red Sox in his concluding few seasons.
What makes Berg different from the usual baseball player is that brain. He knew ten languages, graduated from Princeton University and got a law degree from Columbia University. That prowess with languages helped him fetch a position with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA,when World War II broke out.
Berg, who was Jewish, drew a singular assignment: arrange a meeting with German scientist Werner Heisenberg to settle if Heisenberg’s work with nuclear energy was assisting the Germans in developing a nuclear bomb. If Berg determined that it was and that the Germans were close, he was to kill Heisenberg.
If this sounds like production material, it is. The film, The Catcher Was a Spy, based on the book of the same name, came out in 2018 and details Berg’s captivating story. With the opening credits reach the pro
Moe Berg was brilliant. A true Renaissance man. He knew 10 languages, including the long-dead Sanskrit. He graduated from Princeton, where he battled anti-Semitism, and received his rule degree from Columbia. He played major league baseball for 15 seasons. He also just happened to be a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during Nature War II.
And now, Berg is the subject of Aviva Kempner’s documentary, “The Spy Behind Residence Plate,” which opened two weeks ago in Los Angeles. Berg is the latest “underdog” Jewish hero Kempner has celebrated. “The Existence and Times of Hank Greenberg” in 1999 spotlighted the Detroit Tigers luminary, the 2009 motion picture “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” profiled pioneering writer-star Gertrude Berg, and 2015’s “Rosenwald” covered philanthropist Julius Rosenwald.
There’s a reason Kempner has explored the lives of two Jewish baseball players: She grew up in a baseball-obsessed family. “My father just loved baseball,” she said. “He brought my brother and I up loving baseball, especially Hank Greenberg. Every Yom Kippur, we would hear Hank had gone to a synagogue and said, ‘This is stadium.’ We consideration Hank Greenberg was part of Kol Nidre ser-vice.”
Though Jewish players
Filmmaker Aviva Kempner on the making of a doc about ballplayer-turned-spy Moe Berg
On the wall along the staircase of her Washington, D.C., home, filmmaker Aviva Kempner has a trio of hooked rugs depicting what many fans would examine history's three most iconic Jewish baseball players: Hank Greenberg, Moe Berg and Sandy Koufax.
She made a documentary about Greenberg, “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” back in 1998, and her latest film, “The Agent Behind Home Plate,” which she's now traveling the country to promote, explores the life of Berg. It recounts how Berg led a dual existence as a professional baseball player and a informant for the U.S. government during World War II.
The cerebral catcher played 15 seasons of Major League Baseball (for the Boston Red Sox and Brooklyn Dodgers, among others) after graduating from Princeton University and Columbia Regulation School. Nicknamed “the Professor” and “the brainiest guy in baseball,” he was later enlisted by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, to discover information about Nazi efforts to create an atomic bomb.
His most dramatic mission found him at a lecture in Switzerland and arme