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One of the charms of baseball is that it has always sustained sportswriters who cover it by providing them with picturesque moments that have become the stuff of legend-from the heroic (Babe Ruth waving his bat at the bleachers in Wrigley Field, ostensibly to predict a home run in the 1932 World Series) to the ludicrous (Bill Veeck, owner of the pitiful St. Louis Browns, sending a midget named Eddie Gaedel to pinch-hit during a 1951 game).
Then there was Moe Berg, a Princeton graduate who entered the major leagues in 1923, when most other players were small-town boys who may or may not have made it through high school.
Berg spent 10 of his 15 major-league years as a backup catcher for the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox, hanging on primarily because Walter Johnson and Joe Cronin, the teams' managers, liked him.
If that were all there was to Berg, who finished his career with a .243 average and six home runs scattered among 1,812 at bats, he would only be another of the hundreds of obscure players listed...