Moe Berg Marquee

Moe Berg batted .243 across fifteen seasons and is the most interesting man ever to do so. He read a dozen languages, held a Princeton degree and a Columbia law degree, and was described by a teammate as able to speak seven languages and hit in none of them.

In 1934 he traveled to Japan with an all-star touring party and shot film of Tokyo from a hospital roof, footage the United States is said to have consulted later. During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, and in 1944 was sent to Zurich to attend a lecture by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg with orders to shoot him if the talk suggested Germany was close to an atomic bomb. He judged that it did not.

Born in New York City in 1902, Berg caught 663 games for five clubs and died on May 29, 1972, at seventy.