SHINY THING$ 0174 ✨

It’s (almost) Spring… 

And with that, baseball spring-training games are underway with the regular season right around the corner. Unrelated, (but impossible to ignore) we’re living in a world where foreign policy and international conflict are colliding across every spectrum of our daily lives. 

It’s a weird and uneasy moment in modern history, and every market is seeing volatility as a result.

Sports have often served as a departure from the real world. A momentary escape into a game — one that forces you to pick sides, but connects every fan regardless of the outcome. 

Not that long ago, however, professional sports and international diplomacy were linked when the US government sent a Boston Red Sox catcher to Europe to figure out how far along they were in the building an atomic bomb.

This week, in the 174th installment of Shiny Thing$, a plot-line made for the big screen (and it was actually)…

We’re going to tell you the brief story of Moe Berg: the spy we sent to assassinate a scientist. 

On December 18, 1944, an athletic looking, but unassuming man sat in a Zurich lecture hall. He was playing the part of student, but he was only there for one reason — he was listening for critical words spoken by one specific professor. Clues that might reveal the progress of Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. 

Hidden in his jacket was a pistol. If the wrong words were spoken and the situation demanded, he was ready to act.

Rewind to the start of the century, in New York City...

Born in 1902 in a tenement on East 121st Street in Harlem, Morris “Moe” Berg was the youngest of three children in a Jewish immigrant family. His father, Bernard, a local pharmacist, expected his children to pursue stable, respectable careers. While Berg’s siblings became a doctor and a teacher respectively, he chose sports as both a passion, and a career path. Baseball specifically —a decision that deeply disappointed his father, who refused to watch his son play.

Academically gifted, Berg taught himself multiple languages, earning a spot at Princeton University, where he excelled in modern languages while also played shortstop for the varsity baseball team. 

He was good. Good enough to actually make it into the small fraternity of athletes who turn their passion into a professional career.  

He joined Major League Baseball in 1923, playing for teams like the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox. You can actually find his 1933 Goudey Card on eBay right now for around $400 - it’s from the same set as one of Babe Ruth’s most famous cards. Though never a superstar player. His career batting average was .243, which while not enough to get you in tho the Hall of Fame is not that far off from big names of their era like Eddie Matthews and Darryl Strawberry, but Moe’s intellect and charisma are what made him a clubhouse favorite amongst his teams. A teammate once said, “He can speak seven languages, but he can’t hit in any of them.”

He was sent down to the minors in 1924 but made his way back to the majors in 1926 as a catcher for the Chicago White Sox. Remarkably, he still managed to balance his baseball career with academics, attending Columbia Law School during the off-season and earning his degree while still playing for the White Sox. He earned the title “the brainiest guy in baseball” as a result. He was once asked why he chose to "waste" his intellect on sports when he could be doing so much more. His response was "I’d rather be a ballplayer than a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court."

That same mix of brainpower and charm is also probably what helped him fool foreign governments, and would soon lead him away from baseball and into the world of espionage.

Berg’s transition from athlete to intelligence officer began in the mid-1930s. During a goodwill baseball tour of Japan in 1934, he snuck onto a Tokyo hospital rooftop and filmed the city skyline, including its military and industrial zones. Though his footage held little strategic value, it demonstrated his awareness of global tensions and his ability to secure information in foreign territory without getting caught. 

By 1939, Berg sought a new purpose. 

The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 pushed him toward government service, and by early 1942, he had joined Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, traveling through South America to assess political conditions. Finding little of strategic importance, he sought out more direct involvement in the war effort and was soon recruited by the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.

His first true mission was “Alsos,” a secret Allied initiative to monitor the Nazi nuclear program and recruit European scientists. Unlike the rigid, military-minded officers in the field, Berg operated with charm and improvisation — the same way he worked the clubhouse in the major leagues was what he used to navigate the figurative minefields of Western Europe. He was fluent enough in scientific jargon to hold conversations with top physicists and gather intelligence without arousing suspicion.

One of his most crucial assignments was to evaluate Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading physicist. If Heisenberg’s work suggested the Nazis were close to building an atomic bomb, Berg was under orders to assassinate him. Armed with a pistol and a cyanide capsule, he attended Heisenberg’s lecture in Zurich. Unable to fully grasp the lecture’s physics, Berg instead studied the reactions of scientists in the audience. Sensing no alarm from them, he concluded that Germany was not close to developing a bomb. Heisenberg lived, and Berg slipped away unnoticed.

After the war, the OSS dissolved, and Berg was not invited to join the newly formed CIA. Though he briefly assisted with a mission to assess Soviet nuclear capabilities in 1952, his intelligence career was effectively over. President Truman awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1946, but Berg, still bound by secrecy, declined the honor, stating that his contributions could never be fully understood.

With his spy days behind him, Berg lived a nomadic existence, relying on the hospitality of friends and acquaintances for the majority of his later life. Though once a celebrated figure, he faded into obscurity, which is crazy considering how insane the full story truly is. 

Moe died in 1972 at age 70, his last recorded words to a nurse: “How did the Mets do today?”

Fortunately, he got to see them take home a championship in ’69… more than most modern Mets fans can say.

Until Next Week…