A Baseball Shrine for Those Who Made a Difference

Moe Berg was a weak-hitting catcher who spoke 12 languages and who once went to check out a German atomic scientist named Werner Heisenberg during a 1944 lecture in Zurich. Berg, posing as a graduate student, carried in his pocket a pistol and a suicide pill. Berg’s mission, and he chose to accept it, was to assassinate Heisenberg if Berg determined the Germans were close to exploding an atomic weapon during World War II.

Berg, a Jew, decided the Germans weren’t that close, so Heisenberg and Berg lived on.

Today Berg, along with pitcher Bill Lee and Pam Postema, who tried for 13 years to become major league baseball’s first female umpire, will be inducted into the Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the Eternals in a ceremony at the Pasadena library.

You ask what the Reliquary is?

It is a collection of the weird and wonderful parts of baseball memorabilia collected by Terry Cannon, a 45-year-old Pasadena editor of classic car magazines, and his wife, Mary. Among Cannon’s collectibles is a fragment of skin supposedly from Abner Doubleday’s body; a partially smoked cigar that Babe Ruth may have left at Rose Hicks’ brothel on Broad Street in Philadelphia; a satin thong panty worn by Margo Adams, the notorious party girl who was Wade Boggs’ adulterous lover; and an athletic supporter Cannon believes was worn by Eddie Gaedel, the midget whom promoter Bill Veeck once sent to bat for the St. Louis Browns.

“The athletic supporter won’t be on display Sunday,” Cannon said. “My wife feels that would be in bad taste, to show that at a library.”

Even if his collection of artifacts seems more “eew” than eclectic, Cannon is passionate about baseball and determined to honor men and women who loved the game, who accomplished something, and who will never be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hence, the Shrine of the Eternals.

The first class was inducted last year. Dock Ellis, Curt Flood and Bill Veeck Jr. were the honorees. Ellis was nearly brought to tears in his acceptance of the honor.

“This is like going in some secret door of the Hall of Fame, the door where they let in all those ‘other’ people,” Lee said. Lee, 54, whose parents will come to Pasadena from San Francisco and whose aunt, Annabelle Lee, once played in the women’s professional baseball league, lives on a Vermont farm where he grows raspberries and blueberries. “The Reliquary is where they keep the ones who are different, who have lived different lives. I’m honored about this, though sometimes it’s hard to always get honored for being different. Being different doesn’t pay the bills.”

While Lee, dubbed “Spaceman,” was a goofball and a pitcher, and Postema tried to be a trail blazer, Berg has become a mythical figure, a mysterious, private man who graduated from Princeton, who sneaked up onto the roof of a Tokyo hospital in 1934 and shot newsreel film used by American spy agencies, who hit .243, who never married or had children, who was alienated from many of his relatives, who was willing to kill a man to save his country.

Berg died in 1972. There have been books written on Berg, the most recent being “The Catcher Was a Spy,” detailing many of Berg’s exploits as an agent of the OSS, the organization that became the CIA. George Clooney has the movie rights to the book and wants to play the part of Berg.

Jon Blank, director of the Jewish Baseball Western Wall of Fame, will accept Berg’s invitation into the Shrine of the Eternals.

“Moe was a Renaissance Man, an enigma,” Blank said. “He was a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton and a ballplayer. There have been seven books published about Moe, including one in Japanese. Moe attended the Sorbonne. They used to say about Moe that he could speak 12 languages and hit in none of them. I just find Moe an interesting, interesting character.”

That’s what Cannon wants in his Shrine. Interesting characters.

The Reliquary doesn’t have a permanent home yet. Cannon will bring his oddities, his life mask of Berg, a bit of soil from Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., where the first baseball game between two organized teams was played, to wherever someone has room for a display. Right now that is the Pasadena library. Someday Cannon would like a permanent home.

The Baseball Reliquary is a nonprofit educational institution, Cannon says. There are 100 members of the Reliquary, and it is these members who vote in the members of the Shrine of the Eternals. “I formed the Reliquary in 1996, started touring in 1998,” Cannon said.

“I’ve been collecting this stuff for years,” he added. “My inspiration has been Bill Veeck. I’d like to think if Mr. Veeck was alive today, this would be the kind of museum he would start. I love the folklore of baseball. The more I got into reading baseball history, the more I found out it is very difficult to separate fact from fiction, so why even bother? Myths and legends aren’t always factual, but they are interesting.”

Which makes Moe Berg the perfect Reliquary honoree. Even now, 28 years after his death, Berg’s relatives don’t know where he is buried. The stories of Berg the baseball-playing spy are mind-boggling. Fact or fiction or somewhere in between? Who cares? The stories are all interesting.

And much more fun to talk about than arbitration and holdouts and whether the balls and/or the players are juiced.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.