Open Writing

The Texas Rangers baseball team has fascinated me for four decades, since they stopped being the Washington Senators and moved to Arlington, Texas. The legendary Ted Williams was the manager of a collection of odd characters, pan flashes, and unrealized potential that persisted until last year, when they won their first playoff game in team history. They lost the World Series, but they’re playing again in this year’s edition, and hope springs eternal. There’s little importance in the event to the rest of my family. To them the event is not, as “Pogo” comic strip creator Walt Kelly termed it, the “World Serious.”

It wasn’t called “World Series” at first. According to an article by Doug Pappas in “Outside the Lines,” the playoff series was originally called “The World’s Championship” in the 1887 edition of “Spalding’s Base Ball Guide.” Making the event worldwide made sense for Spalding “which, after all, was published by one of the world’s largest sporting goods companies,” Pappas noted, and had “a vested interest in bringing baseball to other lands.”

Another competing handbook, the “Reach Guide,” referred to the event as “the World’s Championship Series” in 1904, and shortened that to “World’s Series” in 1912. Spalding followed along and reduced it again by two letters, to “World Series,” in 1917. A longstanding myth persists that the name came from the New York “World,” a self-aggrandizing newspaper that supposedly sponsored the first series. That didn’t occur and the notion is a complete misunderstanding.

Speaking of baseball misunderstandings, a favorite of mine happened to Moe Berg, a backup catcher and coach for several major league baseball teams in the 1920s and 30s. One of the most intelligent men to ever play the game, Berg was a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School, was a regular winner on the “Information Please!” radio quiz show, and spoke seven languages fluently. Unfortunately, as a teammate put it, “he can’t hit in any of them.”

In 1933 Berg toured Japanese colleges with some other obscure though intelligent ballplayers to teach baseball, and though merely a third-string catcher, he was invited back in 1934 with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and other big names. Berg greeted the crowds and addressed the national legislature in fluent Japanese, and he took along his 16-mm movie camera. He snuck off during a tour of Saint Luke’s Hospital, one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, to film the city and harbor, and this footage was used by the planners of Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid on the Japanese capital.

That’s right: Moe Berg, the guy Casey Stengel called “the strangest man ever to play baseball” was also an American spy. During World War II he parachuted into Yugoslavia to evaluate the relative strength of various resistance groups, and later jumped into Italy to covertly interview Italian physicists about their German colleagues. Focusing on the Nazi’s nuclear weapons program, Berg went all over occupied Europe interviewing scientists, with the OSS relying on his knowledge of nuclear physics to assess Nazi capabilities.

A bitter Berg resigned the OSS in 1945 and refused the Medal of Freedom awarded to him. He was recruited by the CIA in the 1950s to investigate the Soviet’s nuclear programs but quit after a few years. His brother, with whom he lived, said Berg returned from the war “moody and snappish.” Berg never married or held another job. He refused requests to compile his memoirs until 1960. He agreed to be interviewed by a ghost writer, but the writer sent by the publisher confused him with Moe Berg, of Three Stooges fame. Our Moe Berg was outraged and refused to have anything more to do with memoirs.

Now it’s time to appreciate the World Series, “the American game,” as Walt Whitman noted, that “take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set … and be a blessing to us.”

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** The St Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers in the World Series, 4 games to 3.