* RK Review: The Spy in a Catcher's Mask

by Kurt Willinger (Sabre Press, 1995)

Moe Berg is certainly one of the most interesting characters to ever done baseball flannels. A mediocre player — an apocryphal story quotes Casey Stengel saying “He can speak seven languages but can’t hit in any of them — Berg played for five teams over 15 seasons.

Had he just been one of the few Jewish Major Leaguers, dayenu — it would have been enough. But Berg — who graduated from Princeton, received a law degree, studied at the Sorbonne — was also a “charter member” of the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. Legend has it (and the story has changed over the years) that his contributions as a spy helped the U.S. plan the Doolittle air strikes over Japan as well as determining how close Germany was to developing an atomic weapon. These exploits are told in such non-fiction books as Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy, by Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell, and, more recently, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, by Nicholas Dawidoff.

Kurt Willinger has taken this story and run with it in The Spy in a Catcher’s Mask, an engaging novel that embellishes Berg’s accomplishments. Since I am no expert on either World War II, spying, the OSS, or even Moe Berg’s life, I cannot say how much if fact and how much fiction. I can say, in comparison with many books of this type (i.e., self-published), The Spy in a Catcher’s Mask is better than most. The author present believable situations: Berg is no superman, and his mission is fraught with danger and the definite possibility of bad endings. Only the fact that it is based on actual events spoils the ending.

Sure, there are some stumbles and passages that are less than elegant, but Willinger plays the story out well, including the anti-Semitism that Jews faced, both on the ball field and in the real world. even in triumph, Berg can’t escape his heritage:

When at last they adjourned, Groves extended his fleshy hand to Moe and declared with uncharacteristic vehemence that he thought Moe ‘was just about the ballsiest, of your type,” he had ever met.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” Moe asked, coldly.

“Huh?” said Groves.

“When you say ‘your type’,” Moe repeated, “what do you mean?”

“Well, you know, brainy types–intellectuals,” Groves stammered.

“C’mon, General,” Moe persisted. “There’s not much intellectual about me. Heck, I’m just a ball player. So what do you really me?”

Groves’s expression betrayed his discomfort.

“Well, you know, your type. It’s unusual for you people to…to, you know,” stammered Groves.

“No, I don’t know,” Moe said close to his face. “Do you mean it’s unusual for a Jew to attempt as mission like this?”

“Yeah, kinda. I guess that’s what I meant,” Groves offered, hoping to have cleared it all up.

Moe was wrestling with the impulse to haul off and shove his fist through the general’s moustache….

“My enemies are the Nazis, General, are they yours too?” Moe asked as he stepped back from Groves.

“Of course,” answered the brigadier.

“Well, to listen to you one might think otherwise.”

It’s not great literature, but it is a fair representation of what Berg — and his contemporaries — must have had to go through in America during the years surrounding the War.