Baseball: Giants can leave Angels with sullen faces in 'Wild Card Series'

We've had the New York's own "Subway Series" between the Yankees and the Mets. We've had the all Missouri "1-70" series pitting the Cardinals against the Royals, named after the interstate highway that connects their home towns of St Louis and Kansas City. We even had the "Bay Series" between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. And now, welcome to the Wild Card Series.

An all-California World Series like the one that opens tonight is no novelty – or certainly not enough of one to boost the national ratings for the Fox network that screens it. But for the first time ever, baseball's best-of-seven showcase event, between the Anaheim Angels and those same Giants, features two teams that couldn't even win their divisions in the regular season. A mockery of a 162-game season that is supposed to winnow out the best from the very good? Not a bit of it. In fact, a better thing couldn't have happened to the sport.

Until this gripping postseason, 2002 has been a wretched time for baseball: slumping attendances, a strike narrowly averted, the mooted closure of two franchises, and the weary sense that the same rich guys – the Yankees, the Diamondbacks or the Braves with their rich local markets and huge revenues that enabled them to sign the best players – were going to cruise to victory again, to shrugs of indifference all around.

But in less than three weeks, baseball's old order has been routed. The Angels sent the Yankees packing in the American League Division Series. The Braves went down to the Giants, who then saw off the fancied Cardinals to win the National League pennant. The final showdown will be between two teams whose heritages could hardly be more different.

The Giants are one of baseball's underachieving aristocrats. They haven't won a world championship since 1954, four years before the franchise moved west from New York to San Francisco. That year the Giants swept the all-conquering Cleveland Indians, inspired by Willie Mays and his running, over-the-shoulder catch in deep centre field in Game One – still regarded as the greatest defensive play in Series history.

Now they have another chance, inspired this time by Barry Bonds who is not only the godson of Mays, the immortal "Say Hey" kid, but stands a good chance of overhauling Mays 660 career home runs. If he does, Bonds will be third on the all-time list. Until then he must content himself with his 2001 single season record of 73, and universal recognition that he is the finest slugger in baseball's recent history.

Before this year, Bonds had never shone in the post-season. He was the loner who cared for himself, not his team. This season he has started to put that right with three home runs that helped rout the Braves. More importantly, he is a dilemma for every opposing manager and pitcher. Challenge him, and risk a homer, or walk him, and put an extra potential run on base for someone else to drive in. And that's what's been happening. The supporting cast, David Wells, Kenny Lofton, Benito Santiago, even Jeff Kent, Bond's team-mate-cum-enemy, have been getting the hits as the other side obsesses with Bonds.

But if there's anyone who's not going to be impressed, it's the Angels. Like everyone else they'll face the Bonds quandary, and like everyone else, they get punished on occasion. But Angels haven't reached the first Series in their 42-year history by being faint-hearted.

The implausible franchise owned by Gene Autry and now the Disney Corporation has prospered by true grit, as unglamorous as the strip malls and faceless suburbia of its native Southern California. Unlike Disney it is a team without stars (with the possible exception of the formidable closer Troy Percival) – but one in which anyone can take a game by the scruff of its neck.

The Angels smothered the Yankees by clutch-hitting from every spot in the order. And the same thing happened again in the fifth game of the American League Championship Series, when the unsung No 9 hitter Adam Kennedy went deep three times, only the third three-homer game in post-season history.

In his entire career Kennedy had previously hit 23 homers. Now he smashed three in the most important game of his life. The last of them led to a record-breaking 10-run fifth innings in a 13-5 victory that buried Minnesota and every ghost of the Angel's wretched past.

So who will prevail? This has been a high-scoring post-season, and logic suggests that the hitters will prosper in the grand finale too. But baseball is a perverse business, and the pitchers' hour may have come. In that department the Giants appear marginally stronger. Add in the Bonds factor, and this correspondent's rash prediction is, San Francisco in six.