Hunter Pence, of the San Francisco Giants, warms up during the 2014 World Series Media Day. Photograph by Elsa/Getty

With Derek Jeter a wisp and two wild-card teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals, preparing to tee it up in Game One of the World Series tonight, a quick tour d’horizon of the recent postseason games could help get us in the mood for further surprises. Let’s start with Underpants. Actually, that’s Hunter Pence, the Giants’ right fielder—a name misheard by my wife, Peggy, in the next room during an announcer’s introduction of him as a batter in the early innings of the ESPN telecast of that one-game preliminary shoot-out between the Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates. “ ‘Underpants’? ‘Underpants’—what kind of a name is that?” she cried indignantly. I murmured a correction, but the brain-worm had been implanted, of course, and has proved inoperable. Peggy was not much deterred. “What were his parents thinking?” she said now, coming into the room with me. “He has to have heard this in every grade of elementary school, you know—every day of it, poor guy.” Underpants, oddly enough, was also distinguishable by his actual pants, I’d noticed—the bottoms of his Giants uniform are cut back to the tops of his kneecaps, a height not seen in the majors since the White Sox briefly sported those team Bermudas, back in 1976.

Pence or Pants diverted us from his clothing in the sixth inning of Game Four of the National League Divisional Series, at San Francisco’s A.T. & T. Park, when the Washington Nationals outfielder Jayson Werth hammered a deep drive to the right-field corner. Pence, racing to his left, launched himself upward and outward along the wall, stuck out his mitt and nailed the catch, saving the one-run lead, and perhaps the game and the day, for the Giants. In the replays, he looked like a dissected frog splayed up there, and will remain so forever in the Bay Area unconscious, a twin specimen to Joe Rudi, the Athletics left fielder, who did more or less the same thing against the Cincinnati Reds, back in the 1972 World Series.*

Werth, whose flowing fox-colored beard and shoulder-length hair suggest a discarded droshky lap robe, went one for seventeen in the Nats’ wipeout loss—a miserable showing but not the worst of this painful October. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ stellar young Cuban outfielder, struck out eight times in the course of twelve at-bats against Cardinals pitching—a crater-sized hole had developed in his defense against inside pitches—and was benched for the last game.

Yasiel can bring us to the Giants’ bearded righty reliever named Petit (it’s pronounced like the dress size), who set a record this summer by retiring forty-six consecutive batters. The man and the mark were unknown to me when I watched him deliver six middle innings of one-hit ball against the Nationals, in Game Two of the Divs, but I slowly became aware that the Fox telecasters seemed oddly unwilling to call him by his first name, and then familiarly shorten it, as is the custom. “Who Petit?” I muttered once or twice. “Tell us, guys—O.K.?” Finally it showed up in a visual: he’s Yusmeiro.

And Yusmeiro takes us to Yadier, of course—the Cardinals’ six-time All-Star and two-time World Champion catcher, whose removal from action after an oblique muscle injury sustained while batting in Game Two of the N.L.C.S., seemed to take the heart out of the Redbirds. He hadn’t done much at the plate so far this fall, but he handled his pitchers and, somehow, the tone and processes of the games in the manner of a dean or prelate. An All-Father.

Startling losses and eliminations became the hallmark of these squeeze-down rounds, which never produced a must-win final game; the two surprised wild-card finalists arrive at the World Series with a combined postseason record of 16–2. I felt bad for some of the departing players but worse, I think, for their fans. In the end, I couldn’t decide which of two noisy bands of home-town hankie-wavers had a worse time of it: the black-garbed supporters of the favored Pittsburgh Pirates in that win-or-die first-round game, whose guys ran into a numbing four-hit complete-game 8–0 shutout by Madison Bumgarner; or the scarlet Washington fans at that eighteen-inning, six-hour-and-twenty-three-minute game, lost by their Nats on a home run by the Giants’ Brandon Belt. Twenty-four players and seventeen pitchers were involved in this soul-stretcher, the longest postseason affair ever, but the box score doesn’t show how many of forty-four thousand and thirty-five attendees stayed on to the end; the weather turned wintry in the later late innings, and I saw that the scattered true hearts had begun to wrap their red handkerchiefs around their necks or tuck them up over their faces, for survival.

So many well-regarded and heavily armed teams were going down so quickly—the Nats, the Tigers, the Dodgers, the Angels, the Orioles—that I had a passing flash of towering French or Spanish ships of the line blowing up or foundering with all hands in battles taken from another Jack Aubrey novel. If that had been the case, his fast frigate, his lightly armed but lucky and venturesome H.M.S. Surprise, would be the Kansas City Royals. Possessors of the lowest home-run total in the league, they stole thirteen bases in the post, tied up and then won three games in which they had trailed—including the qualifying opener against the Oakland A’s—and won four times in extra innings. The eager crew—Alex Gordon, Billy Butler, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Salvador Perez, Jarrod Dyson, Brandon Finnegan, and the rest—will be piped to quarters very shortly, where we will come to know them and like them even better. Cain, the center fielder, and the tall, immensely talented catcher Perez will win further citations, and the Giants, because of their bullpen, will win this splendid engagement (it says here) in seven.

*Correction: An early version of this piece placed Rudi in center field.