Offered here is a NM-MT PSA 8 1939 Play Ball baseball card #103 of journeyman catcher and legendary American spy Morris "Moe" Berg. NM-MT or better looking corners. Super clean both front and back. Only five have ever graded higher by PSA. Gorgeous card with nice clarity and brilliant centering. PSA serial #50053438.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law Berg was a brilliant intellectual who learned to write and speak in 15 languages. He was deemed by none other than Casey Stengel to be "the strangest man in baseball" which was high praise indeed. Berg was perhaps most known for his espionage efforts in the Land of the Rising Sun while touring with the famous 1934 Tour of Japan barnstorming group and in Central Europe prior to World War II. Berg worked for the O.S.S. (which later became the CIA) at that time working with various resistance groups and interviewing German nuclear physicists. Following the war he continued to serve occasionally for the O.S.S. on various national security and foreign intelligence issues most of which remains classified (some of these secrets were exposed in his 1994 best-selling biography "The Catcher was a Spy"). It is amusing in retrospect to read the back of his 1939 Play Ball card which notes that he is "regarded as the most educated man in baseball" and that "Moe spends his off-seasons practicing law and globe-trotting having been around the world several times. He also speaks fluently eight different languages."