Disorderly conduct - or - Moe Berg's blues

Moe Berg was a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School. Berg spent 15 years in the majors as a backup catcher. He spoke a dozen languages, but it was said he couldn’t hit in any of them. In 1934, a team of All-Stars traveled to Japan. Berg was one of the “stars,” along with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. While his teammates were focused on playing exhibition baseball games, Berg went to the top of a hospital in Tokyo and filmed the city with his movie camera. As the story goes, that footage was later used in the planning of U.S. bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. After his playing career was over, Berg went to work for the Office of Strategic Services. One of his missions was to determine if physicist Werner Heisenberg intended to help Germany develop atomic weapons. Berg, who was Jewish, was allegedly dispatched to Europe to assassinate Heisenberg if necessary (which it was not). Berg never married. He lived out his life as a delusional, reclusive vagabond.

He was probably insane.

Actually, he was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. (He wouldn’t read newspapers after he saw that someone else had touched them.)

            Mental disabilities and disorders obviously don’t discriminate. In some chicken-or-egg cases, they contribute to making people more eccentric, more artistic, or even more intelligent (though rarely happier). The most common mental illness today is depression (which Berg likely had bouts with, too, to say nothing of obsessive compulsiveness or bipolar disorder). About 10 percent of Americans suffer from depression. Everybody knows about it; it’s hell on families. Lots and lots of people are on medication these days. Others self-medicate, numbing themselves with alcohol and street drugs.

            Anxiety disorder is also fairly common. A real panic attack will send you straight to the emergency room, presenting all of the characteristics of a trapped badger. Because the same drugs are used to treat anxiety and depression, they are often linked. And they do go together; people develop both. Panic attacks feel very different than depression does, but both can be nightmarish and debilitating.

            All of this shit compounds, becoming indistinguishable, swallowing you up. Every day, I take an anti-anxiety and anti-seizure pill. I also take a pill for bipolar disorder (to slow my thoughts down, according to the psych doc) and one for depression. Some would say we are overly-medicated and coddled in a liberal society, and they would be half right; but I know what I was like before, what I had become. I couldn’t leave the house; I was haunted.

I am far from being a genius like Berg was, but I did go crazy. Now I seem to be doing better – since I stopped getting drunk and started seeing the psychiatrist instead of family doctors and psychologists/shrinks. At first, family and friends who meant well tried to empathize instead of sympathize. Because they had heard so much about anxiety and depression (and post-traumatic stress disorder) on the news, they felt like they could understand. Of course, they couldn’t – unless they were struggling with the same issues. Laughably they told me to relax or suggested I get out more. I have a hard time forgiving a few frustrated people who told me to “suck it up” or “be a man.” Over and over, I have had only one thing to say to “normal” people to explain myself: “You don’t understand.”

            Anyway, anxiety and depression have taken a big toll on my family and on my social life. They conspired to steal the “me” from me.

            Maybe Moe Berg could have been even more prolific, especially later in life, if he would have had access to modern chemistry. Maybe not. There are plenty of more recent examples of professional baseball players (and millions of people like me) who have struggled with various and wide-ranging forms of mental illness in their primes. Some of them went on to thrive; others did not.

            Zack Greinke, now on Zoloft, briefly quit baseball due to social anxiety disorder, claiming he’d rather mow lawns. Darrell Porter chased his demons to an early grave. Pete Harnisch’s depression was triggered when he decided to stop using tobacco. Joey Votto had panic attacks. Rick Ankiel and Chuck Knoblauch got the yips. Dock Ellis once threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid, which is a category unto itself.

            There are lots of things lurking, just waiting to drive you batshit crazy. And life as well as baseball – both games of failure – can confound anybody. As Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”  

            Dr. Charles F. Brady is an expert on obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety. “It’s not a matter of intelligence or courage or willpower,” Brady told MLB.com. “When anxiety hits, until you understand what’s going on…no matter who it is, that person’s going to feel like their body’s falling apart. They’re going to feel like they’re dying. They’re going to feel like they’re losing their mind.”

            I know I thought I was.

P.S. Moe Berg’s life was captured beautifully, in full, by Nicholas Dawidoff in The Catcher Was a Spy.

2P.S. The best book I’ve found on this stuff (anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder) is a novel by Juliann Garey: Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See. It is really smart, shocking, hilarious, and heartbreaking.

3P.S. Right after writing this post, I read in the New York Times that benzodiazepines, which are used to treat anxiety, may cause Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia. So I’ve got that going for me.