Now hear this: Audible.com's "All Star" podcast

This is Audible, an annoyingly double-entendred podcast, devoted its July 10 episode to several baseball audio books,including:

• The Big Bam, an unabridged version of Leigh Montville’s 2006 biography on Babe Ruth. After an excerpt from narrator Scott Brick, the podcast’s host, Josephine Reed, conducts a telephone interview with the author that sounds as if it was heavily edited, as if she reworded her questions to fit in with his remarks. For an entity that counts so much on sounds, the presentation is very forced. (You can hear a sample here.)

• The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, by Lawrence Ritter. Ritter is the granddaddy of audio/oral histories, setting the stage for those who came later, including Ken Burns. The excerpt includes his interview with Fred Snodgrass, a member of the New York Giants in the early part of the 20th century. (One thing I’ll say about TIA: they don’t skimp on the excerpts, as do some other audiobook sources.) Ritter, who schlepped around a large reel-to-reel tape recorder for his interviews, gets Snodgrass to tell an amusing story about Charles Victory Faust. Ritter’s other subjects are similarly charming, belying the image of ignorant, ill-spoken athletes. (Hear a sample here.)

• Bums, by Peter Golenbock. Golenbock, who came under scrutiny earlier this year for his salacious novel about Mickey Mantle, produced massive oral histories about several ball clubs, including the Cubs, Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets. In Bums, which originally came out shortly after Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, he analyzes the Brooklyn Dodgers. Raymond Todd serves as narrator of this unabridged audiobook and, judging by the excerpt, does a good job in providing numerous “voices” representative of the people interviewed by the author. (Hear a sample here.)

• Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. This audiobook is narrated by the author in an abridged version. While writers might not be professional performers, they lend a certain credibility to the project. Having written the words, they no doubt know how the aural portion should sound. Reed conducts an in-person interview with him, and it comes off much better, more natural than the one with Montville. (Hear a sample here.)

This special All-Star program is downloadable via iTunes and should be available soon at audible.com.