Moe Berg played in 663 Major League games for five different teams over parts of 15 seasons. The fact that you don’t know his name is perfectly fine.
Once called “the strangest man ever to play baseball” by Hall of Fame skipper Casey Stengel, the longtime catcher was also an Ivy League graduate who spoke nine languages. After his baseball career, Berg went on to serve as a CIA spy, helping the United States to win the race against Germany to build the atomic bomb.
Sounds like perfect fodder for a movie, right? Good…because it’s going to be.
Catcher Was a Spy begins shooting Monday in Prague with Paul Rudd starring as Berg. The film is based off the 1994 book by Nicholas Dawidoff The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg.
According to Deadline, the film focuses on Berg’s most important mission…infiltrating the circle of the lead scientist for the Nazi atomic program.
But is Rudd the right man to play the former catcher-turned-spy?
“I found the idea of Paul Rudd playing Moe Berg a little jarring at first. I like Rudd as an actor, but he’s really made his name playing goofy comedic characters who aren’t exactly ‘the sharpest knife in the drawer,’ whereas Berg was a dignified gentleman with a fearsome intellect,” author Daniel Epstein said. “Hollywood often gets the details painfully wrong when it comes to baseball films, so part of me is already bracing myself to see just how badly they’ll screw up Berg’s incredible story.”
Joining Rudd to round out the cast are Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti and Guy Pearce.
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