Baseball Player and Intelligence Agent. Moe Berg was one of the most unusual personalities on the American scene. A Princeton graduate, he played the 1923 season with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a reserve infielder before abandoning baseball to study at the Sorbonne and attend Columbia Law School. Berg received a B.A., magna cum laude from Princeton in modern languages. He had studied seven languages: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, studying with the philologist Harold H. Bender. His Jewish heritage and modest finances combined to keep him on the fringes of Princeton social life, where he never quite fit in. He returned to baseball in 1926 with the Chicago White Sox, converting to catcher in 1927. He would go on to a fifteen-season career, mostly as a defensive reserve, with the Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators, and Boston Red Sox. He also toured Japan with Babe Ruth's All-Stars in 1934, secretly making films of Tokyo that would later be used in the Doolittle raid. Retiring as a player in 1939, he coached for the Red Sox in 1940 and 1941. Berg joined military intelligence in 1942, first with the Office of Inter-American Affairs, then moved to the Office of Strategic Services in 1944. While with the OSS, he tracked the progress of Werner Heisenberg and the German atomic project, correctly determining that Heisenberg posed no threat to national security. On orders direct from President Franklin Roosevelt, Berg persuaded Antonio Ferri, who had served as the head of the supersonic research program in Italy, to relocate to the United States and take part in supersonic aircraft development here. When Berg returned with Ferri, Roosevelt commented, "I see that Moe Berg is still catching very well". After the war, the OSS was disbanded. Berg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to civilians during wartime, from President Harry S. Truman for his service. He declined to accept it without any public explanation. The citation read: "Mr. Morris Berg, United States Civilian, rendered exceptionally meritorious service of high value to the war effort from April 1944 to January 1946. In a position of responsibility in the European Theater, he exhibited analytical abilities and a keen planning mind. He inspired both respect and constant high level of endeavor on the part of his subordinates which enabled his section to produce studies and analysis vital to the mounting of American operations. After his death, his sister, Ethel, requested and accepted the award on his behalf, later donating it to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, Berg was never more than an average player and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball." Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball." After the war, he did not adjust to civilian life. Aside from a two-year stint with the CIA in 1952 to 1954 and some isolated consulting jobs, Berg mostly subsisted on the hospitality of his family and famous friends, including Nelson Rockefeller, Joe Cronin, and Jimmy Breslin. His last words were: "How did the Mets do today?" His is the only baseball card on display at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Berg is the subject of the documentary film "The Spy Behind Home Plate" by Aviva Kempner, released in 2019. The biographical film "The Catcher Was a Spy" (2018), starring Paul Rudd, was based on Nicholas Dawidoff's biography "The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg" (1994).