With Major League Baseball season in full swing, opening day for the release of The Spy Behind Home Plate is just around the corner. On Friday, May 24, the newest film from award-winning documentary filmmaker Aviva Kempner will open at the Avalon Theatre in Washington, D.C.—followed by New York City on Friday, May 31, and Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday, June 7—before rolling out to theaters across America throughout June and early July.
To mark this historical moment in Washington baseball history, the Washington Nationals (originally the Senators) will host Kempner and pay tribute to the incredible life of Moe Berg.
Berg not only played for the last Washington Senators team to play in the 1933 World Series against the New York Giants, he also trained with the OSS not far from the D.C. team’s home, Griffith Stadium.
“Moe Berg is finally achieving the recognition he so deserves as a World War II hero,” Kempner said.
In 2018, Berg and the 13,000 heroic men and women of the OSS finally received a well-deserved Congressional Gold Medal during a moving ceremony where Berg’s heroism was cited.
The Spy Behind Home Plate features rare historical footage as well as revealing interviews with an All-Star roster of celebrities and other individuals from the worlds of sports, spycraft and history. Interviewees include Berg’s relatives, fellow baseball players, biographer Nicholas Dawidoff, authors David Ignatius and Thomas Powers, MLB historian John Thorn, film professor Dr. Annette Insdorf, playwright Michael Frayn, sports commentator Larry Merchant, sports columnist Ira Berkow, OSS Society president Charles Pinck, Los Angeles Angels manager Brad Ausmus, U.S. Senator Ed Markey and baseball executives Jerry Reinsdorf and Bud Selig.
“This full-length feature documentary explores the broader landscape of his immigrant Jewish upbringing, why he was called the brainiest man in baseball, and his many courageous OSS missions geared towards preventing the Nazis from developing the atomic bomb,” Kempner said. “Berg is the American hero we all need to know more about!”