Now Batting for the Oss...

By R.Z. Sheppard

As a baseball player, Moe Berg belonged in the sock drawer of fame. He began his professional career in 1923 as the third baseman for the Brooklyn Robins and ended it 17 years later as the third-string catcher for the Boston Red Sox. He spent most of his playing days schmoozing and reading in dugouts and bullpens. His lifetime batting average was .243, he had only six home runs, and he was error-prone. If Berg ever stole a base, his latest biography, The Catcher Was a Spy (Pantheon; 453 pages; $24), does not mention it.

What the spirited and diligent writer Nicholas Dawidoff does document, with fresh research, some 200 interviews and unqualified affection, is that the oddball legend of Moe Berg is based mainly on his refusal to take full cuts at his many opportunities. He was a Princeton honors graduate who would have had a longer and more successful career in the classroom than on the diamond; a lawyer trained at Columbia who never established a practice; a linguist with a reluctance to converse in any of the dozen languages he had studied; and a darkly handsome ladies' man who was nevertheless something of a prude.

On a slow day sportswriters could depend on the polymath Berg to fill a column. "More profiles of Berg were published than any other journeyman ballplayer in history," writes Dawidoff. But he will be best remembered as the spy who took rain checks. An OSS operative during World War II, Berg traveled widely, lived well and managed to be where trouble wasn't. In 1944 he was at a conference in peaceful Switzerland to hear a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who headed Hitler's atom-bomb project. Berg's orders were to shoot the scientist if it became apparent that the Nazis were close to producing a nuclear weapon. Berg did not know enough physics or German to be sure whether or not he should shoot, and he didn't. The genius who formulated the uncertainty principle proved to be an incompetent administrator, so his continued service to the Reich probably benefited the Allies.

After the war, Berg, a charming, literate and steadfastly unemployed semi- celebrity, parlayed his baseball and espionage experiences into 25 years of free room and board. Until his death in 1972 at the age of 70, he lived at his sister's house in Newark, New Jersey. From there he played the circuit of hospitable friends. His routine was to call up to say he happened to be in town and then wait for the inevitable invitation.

Once lodged, he could be difficult to remove. Joe DiMaggio offered a night's stay at his Manhattan hotel suite, and Berg remained for six weeks. He traveled light: a toothbrush, a razor and a book, sometimes in Sanskrit. His road uniform was a dark wash-and-wear suit and a white nylon shirt that he would rinse out and hang up to dry before bedtime. In the morning, one host recalled, Moe would show up for breakfast fully dressed though a bit damp.

Nearly all Dawidoff's sources agree that Berg was good company and an intriguing storyteller. He had been tangential to big events. He could talk politics, philosophy and sports. Babe Ruth was a pal, as were Nelson Rockefeller and Chico Marx. Eventually the reader comes to see Berg as a one- man March of Time.

But blending himself into history and folklore may have been a strategy to deflect intimacy and embarrassing inquiry. Dawidoff suggests this view, with speculation that Berg had trouble living up to his billing as athlete-scholar- spy and actually felt unworthy. Just as likely, he feared the dull prospect of settling down after baseball and a good war and so decided to schedule the rest of his life as a series of away games.