Morris "Moe" Resner

Morris “Moe” Resner, a lifelong baseball player and devoted Chicago Cubs fan, respected financial professional, stand-up comedian, author, filmmaker, preservationist, and proud United States Marine, died on September 23, 2026, at the age of 95.

Moe lived what he described as three lives: one in baseball, one in finance, and one in show business.  Somehow, he managed to pursue all three with an energy, humor, curiosity, and determination that stayed with him throughout his life.

One of those lives was baseball.  Baseball was one of the great constants of Moe’s life. Growing up in the Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium, he might have seemed destined to become a Yankees fan. Instead, a friend persuaded him to follow the Chicago Cubs, beginning a devotion that would last for the rest of his life. A Cubs fan since the 1940s, Moe followed the team through generations of players, seasons of disappointment, and ultimately the unforgettable joy of seeing his beloved Cubs win the World Series in 2016. The following year brought another extraordinary moment. On May 25, 2017, the Chicago Cubs invited Moe to Wrigley Field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. He also took batting practice at Wrigley that day. For someone who had spent most of his life loving the Cubs and playing the game himself, it was a fitting and memorable honor.

Moe, however, was never content merely to watch baseball. He played amateur and semi-professional ball and remained actively involved in the game at an age when nearly everyone else had long since hung up their cleats. For 35 consecutive years, he served as a coach and statistician for the Pelham Mets Baseball Club, making a 106-mile round trip on the days he coached. Even well into his 80s, Moe was still stepping into the batter’s box. He took batting practice with the Tennessee Smokies and, despite standing only 5 feet 6 inches and weighing 133 pounds, could still hit fastballs clocked at approximately 75 miles per hour.

Moe’s own baseball career included a remarkable and unusual distinction. On April 6, 1978, at age 47, he signed a professional player contract with the Montreal Expos organization. Satchel Paige had famously become the oldest rookie in Major League history when he signed with the Cleveland Indians at age 42 in 1948. Moe was five years older when he signed his first contract with a Major League organization.

Although the historical record is still being examined to determine precisely where Moe’s signing ranks, the surviving contract raises the possibility that Morris “Moe” Resner was the oldest person ever to sign his first professional player contract with a Major League organization.

Moe’s connection to baseball history extended far beyond the Cubs and his own time on the field. On September 29, 1957, he traveled from the Bronx to the Polo Grounds for the New York Giants’ final game before the franchise moved to San Francisco. He brought along his 16mm movie camera to capture what would become the end of an era in New York baseball history. While newspapers and professional photographers recorded the occasion, Moe stood only about 30 feet from home plate and filmed the ceremonies and portions of the game in color. His footage captured a vanished piece of New York baseball history, including the farewell ceremonies and figures from the Giants’ storied past and present. With the help of his parents, Moe added titles and narration to the film. Decades later, he revisited the footage and developed it into a documentary, End of an Era. The film eventually reached Cooperstown, where it was privately screened at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The film also connected Moe to the New York Giants Preservation Society, an organization devoted to remembering, treasuring, and preserving the history of the New York Baseball Giants. Moe became a member of the Society, a particularly appropriate role for a man who had personally preserved one of the franchise’s most historic days on film.

In 2012, more than half a century after he stood at the Polo Grounds with his movie camera, Moe returned to Giants history in San Francisco. At an event associated with the Preservation Society, portions of his film were shown on the stadium’s giant screen, and Moe addressed a crowd of tens of thousands of fans. It was an extraordinary continuation of a story that had begun with a young man, a movie camera, and a $2.50 box seat in New York.

Moe was also a familiar presence in the wider baseball community. For more than half a century, he was a regular at the annual New York Baseball Writers’ Dinner, attending at least 51 consecutive gatherings and continuing that remarkable tradition through the 101st gala in January 2026. He was also a longtime participant in the New York Professional Baseball Hot Stove League dinners. Through these gatherings and his decades in the game, Moe formed lasting friendships with players, coaches, scouts, broadcasters, writers, and others throughout baseball. But some of Moe’s favorite baseball experiences required no ceremony or recognition at all. He simply loved going to the ballpark, and he especially loved taking other people with him. For Moe, baseball was something to be shared.

Another of Moe’s lives was finance.  He began a long career in financial management in 1949 and spent more than two decades working with Congress Factors and Century Factors. Over the years, he became deeply involved in the credit profession and served in leadership positions with numerous professional organizations, including the Exchequer/Metropolitan Credit Club, the Uptown Credit Group, the American Credit Club, the 475 Credit Club, and the TMA New Jersey Chapter. His association with the New York Institute of Credit lasted approximately 70 years. He served as its president from 1964 to 1965 and, decades later, was recognized as the organization’s oldest active member.

And then there was show business.  Performing under the name Mike Reese, Moe pursued a career as a stand-up comedian beginning in the 1950s and was an active member of the Screen Actors Guild. While simultaneously pursuing finance and semi-professional baseball, Moe became a writer and master of ceremonies for financial-industry roasts at New York’s famed Copacabana. Those shows featured comedians including Jackie Mason, Susie Essman, Freddie Roman, Pat Cooper, and Dick Capri. Moe also performed with Henny Youngman and appeared on the Broadway stage.

Humor came naturally to him, and he could find comedy almost anywhere, including in himself. His entertainment life was never entirely separate from his other two lives. Finance supplied material and audiences for comedy, baseball supplied characters and friendships, and somehow Moe moved comfortably among all three worlds.

His love of entertainment extended far beyond stand-up comedy. Moe was a lifelong devotee of classic movies. He remembered the films of his youth not as “classics,” but simply as the movies everyone went to see. His favorites included the films of Humphrey Bogart, but one movie star held a particularly special place in his life. Moe first became captivated by Ginger Rogers when he was a boy. In 1965, when Rogers was appearing on Broadway in Hello, Dolly!, Moe finally met the woman he had admired since childhood. What began as an unlikely encounter developed into a close friendship that lasted approximately 30 years.

Moe also counted comedian Jackie Mason as a longtime friend and crossed paths over the years with performers including Walter Matthau, Peter Falk, Jack Lemmon, Lauren Bacall, José Ferrer, and others.

In 2019, Moe’s lifelong passion for classic film brought another remarkable experience. He appeared on Turner Classic Movies with host Ben Mankiewicz in connection with a presentation of Ginger Rogers’ Academy Award-winning film Kitty Foyle. Moe traveled to Atlanta for the filming and later wrote proudly about becoming part of the TCM family. For Moe, classic movies were not simply old films.

They were connections to people, places, and moments that deserved to be remembered. That instinct to remember may be one of the best ways to understand him. Moe was an extraordinary keeper of memories. He maintained detailed personal diaries stretching from 1942 through 2009 and preserved Cubs scrapbooks, box scores, newspaper clippings, photographs, films, correspondence, and other memorabilia. His collection documented not only his own remarkable life, but decades of baseball, business, entertainment, friendships, and American life as he experienced them.

Those records eventually helped Moe tell his own story in print. Moe collaborated with author George H. Gregor on The Chicago Cubs . . . and Moe, a history of the Cubs intertwined with Moe’s remarkable life and lifelong devotion to the team. Gregor initially intended for Moe simply to contribute a foreword. But as the two became friends, Gregor discovered that Moe was far more than an elderly Cubs fan. Here was a man still actively involved in baseball, with decades of diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, films, and memories, who had simultaneously pursued careers in finance and entertainment.

His autobiography ultimately spanned 72 years of his life and became an integral part of The Chicago Cubs . . . and Moe. The fifth edition, published in 2020, credits the work to “George H. Gregor with Moe Resner.”

In many ways, the book brought Moe’s three lives together.  There was Moe, the lifelong ballplayer and Cubs fan. There was Morris Resner, the financial professional.  And there was Mike Reese, the stand-up comedian and entertainer.  They were all the same man.  But even those three lives did not encompass everything that mattered to Moe. He also served his country as a private in the United States Marine Corps. He remained deeply proud of having been a Marine, carrying his Marine Corps Certificate of Satisfactory Service in his wallet for the rest of his life.

Yet the people closest to Moe knew another side of him, one that could never be fully captured by a list of accomplishments. He was sentimental, funny, persistent, and deeply loyal. At the dinner table, Moe was the family storyteller, reaching back into his extraordinary store of memories to tell stories of the people he had met, the games he had seen, the places he had been, and the experiences he never wanted forgotten. And because Moe was Moe, a story rarely got very far without a joke. The professional comedian never entirely left the room.

Loyalty was one of the threads running through his life. He stayed with the Cubs through decades of heartbreak before finally seeing them win it all. He maintained friendships across generations, remained connected to professional organizations for decades, coached the same baseball club for 35 years, and carefully preserved the photographs, films, letters, diaries, and memories of the people and experiences he treasured. Even as he grew older, he did his best to remain connected to longtime friends. When Moe cared about something, or someone, he held on.

That was true above all with his family. Behind the baseball stories, business meetings, comedy stages, famous friends, and remarkable adventures was a husband, father, stepfather, grandfather, and great-grandfather who loved his family and whose stories and humor became part of their own lives. Moe shared important chapters of his life with both Freda and Mary Lou. Mary Lou, his wife until her death, was his companion through many of the later years and experiences of his remarkable life.

For all the history he carried with him, Moe did not simply live in the past. He kept participating. He continued coaching, attending baseball events, making people laugh, following his Cubs, preserving history, maintaining friendships, spending time with his family, and stepping onto baseball fields and swinging a bat well into his later years.  There is perhaps no better image of Moe than that: an elderly man walking toward home plate, bat in hand, still ready for the next pitch.

Morris “Moe” Resner lived 95 years, but the length of his life tells only part of the story. He packed those years with baseball games and business meetings, comedy and movies, friendships and family, treasured memories and new adventures. He witnessed enormous changes in the world around him while holding tightly to the people, places, and traditions that mattered to him. He was nostalgic and sentimental, something he readily acknowledged about himself. He treasured the people he had known and the memories he had accumulated. Yet he never stopped creating new ones.

Moe lived three lives. And he lived each of them fully.  Above all, Moe leaves behind a family who will remember him not only for the remarkable stories he accumulated and the unusual things he accomplished, but as a husband, father, stepfather, grandfather, great-grandfather, brother, storyteller, and friend. He is survived by his sons, Edward and Morris; his daughter, Frances; his stepdaughter, Tara; and his many beloved grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  He was predeceased by his daughter, Erica; his brother, Seymour; his former wife, Freda; his wife, Mary Lou; and his parents, Abraham and Fannie.

A proud United States Marine, Moe was laid to rest at Calverton National Cemetery in Calverton, New York.

Thanks for the memories, Moe