Robert Rodat’s biographical film, The Catcher Was a Spy, is the true story of professional baseball player, Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) and his mission to assassinate German scientist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) before he delivers Adolf Hitler a nuclear weapon.
The movie opens with Berg behind the plate for the Boston Red Sox. At the tail end of his 15-year career, we find this brilliant Princeton graduate who received a B.A. in modern languages, speaks seven languages fluently, and chose to play baseball for the sheer love of the game. As players do they get old and their batting average goes on a decline. Berg is told this would be his last season as an active player.
“…true story of a professional baseball player and his mission to assassinate a German scientist…”
His final duty as a Red Sox is accompanying the team to pre-WWII Japan for an exhibition game. Being fluent in Japanese, Berg establishes a relationship with a Japanese Officer Kawabata (Hiroyuki Sanada), who casually speculates that Japan is on the verge of war with the United States. This inspires Berg to secretly photograph Toyko Harbor from the top of his hotel.
Rejecting an offer as a coach for the Red Sox, Berg turns over his photos of Tokyo to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), successor to the CIA. It is here that he becomes an agent and is eventually sent on the aforementioned assassination mission.
"…made for posterity sake."
Paul Rudd was a horrible choice for Moe Berg. He was small in stature while Moe wasn’t. In the baseball scenes he is very weak as a player. But worst of all is that there’s not a scintilla of truth to his sexuality in any place in any document. It was added as a gimmick and ruined what was a mediocre film at best, when with the right actors and the real truths, it could of been a great film. Shame on the filmmakers, they ruined there chances of doing the film that could have been special.