- Read by: Barry Abrams is the only reader credited, handling rules, statistics and ranked lists across a long single-voice recording for Tantor Audio.
- At its heart: Fundamentals of hitting, pitching and fielding, reading statistics, coaching and umpiring, the culture of the game.
- Vibe: Patient and companionable, closer to a clubhouse conversation than a classroom.
- Short version: A generous, unhurried primer whose weak point is the currency its own description keeps promising and never demonstrates.
Joe Morgan's name carries this audiobook, and the publisher's copy knows it. A Baseball Hall of Fame player explaining the sport in down to earth language, so that everyone from the casual observer to the die-hard fan gains a fuller appreciation of it, is the whole pitch. What the copy never addresses is how a reference title behaves once you can no longer see the page.
Where This One Lands
Tantor Audio released this fourth edition on March 24, 2020, and the description defines the book almost entirely against the one before it. Since the third edition, we are told, teams have changed, new MLB stadiums have been built, and rules have been updated. Not one of those changes is named. No rule, no ballpark, no roster. A listener trying to work out whether the update earns eleven hours gets a promise of currency with nothing attached to it, and that promise gets thinner every year the file stays on sale.
What sits underneath the promise is a genuine reference book, and a broad one. Improve your hitting, pitching and fielding. Find a team to play on, from Little League on up. Evaluate stats, players and records. Coach baseball or umpire effectively. Those four lines are the spine of the thing, and between them they address four different people: the player, the parent, the fan doing arithmetic on a box score, and the volunteer who agreed to umpire on Saturday mornings without quite knowing the rules.
A word about format, because it counts for more here than in most titles. Bulleted lists and ranked tables are page furniture. Morgan's personal lists of the toughest pitchers, the smartest players and the most strategic managers work in print because your eye can hold ten names at once and go back up the column. Read aloud, ten names in sequence is simply ten names in sequence. Whether the production did anything to help with that is not something this listing discloses.
Note also where the record files itself. The category is sports and outdoors, the tag reads Baseball and Softball, and softball does not turn up in the description a single time. Morgan writes about one game, in one game's vocabulary, and the second sport in that tag is doing no work whatsoever. A small thing, but small things of this kind tell you how much attention the listing page itself received before it went live.
What Makes Baseball for Dummies, 4th Edition Worth Hearing
Six people have rated it, and the average shows 4.3. That figure is more precise than it looks. With six whole-number grades sitting behind a 4.3, the sum of those grades can only be 26 out of a possible 30, which leaves the record four stars short of a clean sweep. Some mixture of strong marks with a little dissent, in other words, and no way at all to see which mixture it was.
Not one of those six wrote a sentence. The column where written responses would sit is empty, so the only thing on the record that speaks to the reading is the credit itself: Barry Abrams, a single reader, eleven hours and twenty-three minutes, published by Tantor Audio. The assignment is harder than it sounds. Positions, rules, statistics and rankings all have to stay legible at speaking pace, often to someone who is driving.
The case for the audio edition is the case for the book with one addition. The byline belongs to a player rather than a reporter working from the press box, and the copy leans on that from its first line to its last. Eleven hours and twenty-three minutes is room enough to move from hitting, pitching and fielding through stats and records and out the other side into coaching and umpiring, at a pace that never has to compress anything. A printed guide of this size gets skimmed. A recording of this size gets finished, which is a different and occasionally better way to absorb a subject you know nothing about.
What Gives Us Pause
A reference book read aloud carries one structural problem, and it deserves naming before you commit the time. Titles like this are built for random access. You want the passage on evaluating a statistic, you turn to it. Audio runs in one direction. Whether this production offers chapter marks fine enough to land you on the umpiring material, or leaves you scrubbing through most of a working day to find it, the listing does not say.
Second, the currency argument cuts both ways. The synopsis was written to sell an update, so it emphasizes change: new stadiums, revised rules, altered rosters. Anyone coming to it now should apply the same logic in reverse. A 2020 recording describes the game as it stood in 2020, and the record carries a single release date with no revision note anywhere on it. Where the book talks about players and places, treat it as a photograph with a date in the corner.
Third, the number in the title. Calling itself a fourth edition tells you three came before, and the description spends its opening paragraph on that lineage. What the record will not tell you is whether any earlier edition was ever recorded, so a listener who already owns an older copy in print cannot judge how much of this eleven hours is actually new. The comparison the copy invites is one you have no way to run.
Who Should Listen to Baseball for Dummies, 4th Edition
Take it on if you are new to the sport and want one long, patient explanation from someone who played it at the top, rather than a season of half-understood broadcasts. It suits the parent whose kid just joined a team, the fan who can follow a game but cannot read a box score, and the listener who wants the coaching and umpiring material running in the background while the yard work gets done. Eleven hours is a real commitment, but it is a commitment to one coherent voice rather than a scattered pile of clips, and the four bullet points in the description are an honest map of where those hours go.
Pass on it if you already follow the game closely. The copy is explicit that the audience starts at the casual observer, and a die-hard will be waiting a long stretch for the ranked lists at the end. It is also the wrong shape for anyone who wants a book to consult rather than absorb, since the format works directly against that. Coaches and umpires with one specific question in mind should find the chapter list before they buy, not after.
A Few Questions About Baseball for Dummies, 4th Edition
How long is the Baseball for Dummies audiobook and who reads it?
It runs eleven hours and twenty-three minutes, with Barry Abrams credited as the sole reader and Tantor Audio as publisher. The release date on the record is March 24, 2020. No second voice, guest contributor or dramatized element appears anywhere in the credits, so expect one steady voice throughout.
Does the audiobook include Joe Morgan's top ten lists?
Three ranked selections are promised in the copy, each a personal top ten drawn from Morgan's own career: pitchers, players and managers. Nothing on the listing suggests the audio handles them any differently from the surrounding chapters, so plan on hearing thirty names in sequence rather than scanning three printed columns.
