Does anyone know the name of the former Major League player who mysteriously disappeared in the 1950's?

Question

I think he played in the late teens or early twenties. He was never found.

Answer 1

There was a catcher named Moe Berg who became a spy during WWII and after the war became somewhat of a recluse.

The Moe Berg story is an interesting one, he was only an average ML catcher but they say he was a genius and made a great spy.

Answer 2

Yeah, the Giants chances of ever winning a World Championship mysteriously dissapeared in the 1950s when they moved out west to California.

Answer 3

No clue on that one.
Was it Roy Hobbs :)
(The Natural, Robert Redford)

Answer 4

I wish I knew.
My sister would know, but she is asleep.
She knows lots of baseball stuff.

Good luck finding out!

Answer 5

[edit] Spying for the U.S. Government
With the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, the United States was thrust into World War II. To do his part for the war effort, Berg accepted a position with Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs on January 5, 1942. Nine days later, his father, Bernard, died. During the summer of 1942, Berg screened the footage he shot of Tokyo Bay for intelligence officers of the United States military. The film may or may not have helped Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle plan his famous Doolittle Raid.

From August 1942 until February 1943, Berg was on assignment in the Caribbean and South America. His job was to monitor the health and physical fitness of the American troops stationed there. Berg, along with several other OIAA agents, left in June 1943 because they thought South America posed little threat to the United States, and they wanted to be someplace where their talents would be put to better use.

On August 2, 1943, Berg accepted a position with the Office of Strategic Services for a salary of $3,800 a year. In September, he was assigned to the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS and given a place at the OSS Balkans desk. In this role, he parachuted into Yugoslavia to evaluate the various resistance groups operating against the Nazis to determine which was the strongest. He talked to both Draza Mihajlovic and Josip Broz and reviewed their forces, deciding that Josip Broz had the stronger and better supported group. His evaluations were used to help determine the amount of support and aid to give each group. In late 1943, Berg was assigned to Project Larson, an OSS operation set up by OSS Chief of Special Projects John Shaheen. The stated purpose of the project was to kidnap Italian rocket and missile specialists out of Italy and bring them to the U.S. However, there was another project hidden within Larson called Project AZUSA with the goal of interviewing Italian physicists to see what they knew about Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. It was similar in scope and mission to the Alsos project. On May 4, 1944 Berg left for London and the start of his mission.

From May to mid-December, Berg hopped around Europe interviewing physicists and trying to convince several to leave Europe and work in America. At the beginning of December news about Heisenberg giving a lecture in Zurich, Switzerland reached the OSS, and Berg was assigned the task of attending the lecture and determining "if anything Heisenberg said convinced him the Germans were close to a bomb." If Berg came to the conclusion that the Germans were close, he had orders to shoot Heisenberg; Berg determined that the Germans were not close. During his time in Switzerland, Berg became close friends with the physicist Paul Scherrer. Berg returned to the United States on April 25, 1945, and resigned from the Strategic Services Unit, the successor to the OSS, in August. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 10, but he rejected the award on December 2. His sister later accepted it on his behalf after he died.


[edit] After World War II
In 1952, Berg was hired by the CIA to use his old contacts from World War II to find out about Soviet atomic science. For the $10,000 plus expenses that Berg received, the CIA got nothing in return. The CIA officer that spoke with Berg when he returned from Europe said that he was "flaky."

For the next 20 years, Berg had no real job, living off friends and relatives who put up with him because of his great charm. When they would ask what he did for a living, he would reply by putting his finger to his lips, giving them the impression that he was still a spy. He lived with his brother Samuel for seventeen years. According to Samuel, he became moody and snappish after the war and did not seem to care for much in life besides his books. His brother finally grew fed up with the arrangement and asked Moe to leave and even had eviction papers drawn up. After being evicted from his brother's home, Berg moved in with his sister Ethel in Belleville, New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Berg received many requests to write his memoirs, but turned them down; he almost wrote them in 1960, but he quit after the co-writer assigned to him confused him with Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.

Moe Berg died on May 29, 1972, at age 70, from injuries sustained in a fall at home. A nurse at the Newark, New Jersey hospital where he died recalled his final words as, "How did the Mets do today?" (They won.) [1] His remains were cremated and spread over Mount Scopus in Israel. It has been said he really did want to write his memoirs; however, his death precluded that. Thus, much of his life remained a mystery that he took to the grave with him.

Berg was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals in 2000.[2]


[edit] Notes

Answer 6

nope

Answer 7

no idea

Answer 8

no