Batter up for this CD anthology

If Sox vs. ‘Stros in the World Series that starts today doesn’t exactly get your tobacco juices flowing, the Shout! Factory record label has just released a national pastime-packed set of four CDs that should ease that case of baseball withdrawal.

Just one of the discs in “The Great American Baseball Box” ($59.98 suggested retail) is devoted to music, and while most of the songs have been available in past baseball packages, John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” and Bob Dylan’s “Catfish” make their anthology debuts.

The bulk of the content is spoken words, from game broadcasts and comments by players to such cultural ephemera as commercials and baseball-related news items.

So with that music-to-game ratio, why’s it in the arts pages rather than the sports section? Well, it also has poetry (DeWolf Hopper reading “Casey at the Bat”) and comedy (Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?”), and there’s something undeniably Shakespearean about Tom Lasorda’s 1976 oration after Dave Kingman’s three home runs did in his Dodgers.

And if you finally decide to hit the field of dreams yourself, the packaging is a stroke of genius. Just remove the CDs and the plastic and the cardboard from the padded square box, fill it with some infield dirt and voila! -- first base.

-- Richard Cromelin