Moe Berg was, as a baseball player, unexceptional. He played in the Majors, bouncing around the league for between 1923-1939, but he was a career .243 hitter, and is the inspiration for this ignominious, traditional baseball scouting assessment: “Good field, no hit.”
What a scouting report might have missed: Berg had degrees from Princeton and Columbia Law, studied at the Sorbonne during one off-season, and spoke seven languages (“But he can’t hit in any of them,” a teammate once said). A diligent scout might have found that, but here’s something they certainly wouldn’t have uncovered: Moe Berg was to become a spy for the O.S.S.