There's a right way and a wrong way to put together a baseball music collection. Fortunately for music lovers and baseball fans alike, Shout! Factory gets good wood on most of four-CD The Great American Baseball Box.

The music cuts include Bob Dylan's "Catfish," Dave Frishberg's bossa nova standard "Van Lingle Mungo" (which he wrote after coming across offbeat 1940s player names while flipping through The Baseball Encyclopedia), Teresa Brewer's campy 1956 tribute to Mickey Mantle, "I Love Mickey" ("Not Yogi Berra?" Mantle chimes in) and John Fogerty's "Centerfield."

Most of the standard spoken word and play-by-play clips are here (Russ Hodges' "The Giants win the pennant!" call from 1951, Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine and, er, Joe Carter's 1993 Series-winning home run off Mitch Williams), but also such unexpected gems as DeWolf Hopper's 1909 recording of "Casey at the Bat" followed by Hopper's rendition of a parody ("The Man Who Fanned Casey"), a funny 1947 clip from the radio comedy Duffy's Tavern about a two-headed pitcher and a groaningly unfunny 1928 comedy routine by "Home Run Twins" Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

No fewer than eight live cuts are devoted to Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, clips that in the wake of steroid revelations now carry a different subtext. It's a little eerie hearing NBC's Brian Williams describing McGwire's 62nd home run in 1998 as "his ticket, really, to the Hall of Fame."

Aside from three clips of Philadelphia A's manager Connie Mack, Philly's largely shut out of the collection (a Wheaties radio commercial from 1950 describes Richie Ashburn, without sound bites from Whitey). Nevertheless, The Great American Baseball Box is the perfect music to bring along for an afternoon at Citizens Bank Park—and should the game get rained out, the base-sized and -shaped CD box can be used as a floatation device.