Home Plate Don't Move: Baseball's Best Quotes and Quips

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

Baseball consists of seconds of action surrounded by seeming minutes of
inaction. It has been said that in a baseball game that takes over two
hours to play, there are only five minutes when the ball is actually in
play. Whether true or not, it is a truism to say that abundant time
exists for conversation, before, during, and after the game. But
sportswriter Red Smith maintained that “baseball is dull only to dull
minds.”

Home Plate Don’t Move is a collection of noteworthy quotations
attributed to players, coaches, managers, reporters, broadcasters, and
others infatuated with the game of baseball. Compiler Eric Zweig
describes the book as “a celebration of those little gems of wisdom or
whimsy.” Organized alphabetically from “Age Old Question” to
“Yogi,” hundreds of one-liners and “zingers” are featured.
Attention to graphics and colour provide variety to avoid the monotony
of experiencing only single sentences.

Included is Ernie Banks’s enthusiastic “It’s a great day for a
ballgame; let’s play two”; Casey Stengel’s insight “Most ball
games are lost, not won”; and Dizzy Dean’s bravado “It ain’t
braggin’ if you can do it.” A classic statement comes from Willie
Stargell: “They give you a round bat and they throw you a round ball,
and then they tell you to hit it square.”

Zweig, a former member of the grounds crew at the Rogers Centre,
probably took great pride in including Tom Cheek’s call of Joe
Carter’s winning homer in the 1993 World Series, “Touch ’em all
Joe. You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life.” Reading
quotations from Home Plate Don’t Move could provide an enjoyable
diversion between pitches.