Know the foe: Alabama baseball faces the nation's top team in Wake Forest

TideIllustrated's Tony Tsoukalas caught up with DeaconsIllustrated's Conor O'Neill to discuss what No. 16 Alabama baseball will be up against when it travels to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for its super-regional matchup against No. 1 Wake Forest this weekend.

There’s no question Wake Forest has the best pitching staff in the nation. Can you tell us a little bit about how the Demon Deacons will arrange their rotation for the series and what to expect from each pitcher?

We won’t get the breakdown on how Wake Forest is lining up its staff until Friday, but it feels like Rhett Lowder and Josh Hartle will start the first two games.

I saw a handful of Carlos Rodon starts when he was at N.C. State, and in my mind it’s a toss-up whether he or Lowder is the best college pitcher I’ve seen. Lowder is just the complete package with velocity, location, execution in and around the zone. If you’re going to score against him, it’s going to come in the first couple of innings before he establishes a feel for his changeup, or at the end of the start if he’s running out of gas.

Hartle is likely a first-rounder next year; he’s a lefty who throws heavy. He was having a bumpy freshman season a year ago but started throwing a cutter late in the season and that’s turned him into a dominant pitcher.

The mystery becomes who starts that if-necessary Game 3 and it depends on who gets used in the first two games. There are two options: Seth Keener or Sean Sullivan. Keener was a lights-out long reliever for most of the season but moved into a starting role when Sullivan experienced some inflammation in the last few weeks. Sullivan has come back, throwing three sharp innings on Sunday.

I’d expect one of Keener and Sullivan to be used in relief in the first two games, and then the who isn’t would be in line to start Game 3.

Wake Forest doesn’t have many weaknesses, but if there’s a chink in the armor, where is it?

So I try to be really unbiased and objective, and I think that’s important to establish.

I don’t know that this team has a weakness.

Their pitching staff has been dominant; their lineup goes deep with power; their defense is fantastic. They’re an older team, so I don’t know that they’re going to be swallowed up by the brighter lights.

I’ve covered about 15 games this season and the only loss was in the ACC tournament to Miami. In that game, Miami made five of the best defensive plays I’ve seen this year and got a few good breaks with grounders that found holes.

Wake Forest just isn’t a team that’s going to beat itself. And every time I’ve gone into a game or series thinking of writing something like, “this is going to be their Achilles heel,” they prove that not to be the case.

I say all that … and it’s baseball. Anything can happen, as we saw last year when Notre Dame went to Tennessee and beat last year’s no-weakness super team.

In 2021, Wake Forest was a 20-win team. How were things able to turn around so dramatically over the past two seasons?

Two things happened:

One, they had to change the culture of the program. They had an older team in 2021 that had a bunch of players who weren’t planning on being in college for that long, but were still here because of COVID and the shortened MLB draft. So when adversity hit that season, it went south in a hurry.

Two, they had to find the right pitching coach. Matt Hobbs went to Arkansas in Dec. 2018 and left them in a difficult spot, and that led to John Hendricks’ hiring. He’s one of Wake’s best pitchers in program history but he just wasn’t a good fit with the state of the art pitching lab Wake Forest has and the analytical tools at their disposal.

So while the culture shift was over time following the 2021 season and most of the work went into that in the fall, hiring Corey Muscara as pitching coach following the 2021 was a dynamite move that’s obviously paid off.

Wake Forest hasn’t made the College World Series since 1955. How much buzz is there around the program at the moment, and what kind of atmosphere are you expecting in David F. Couch Ballpark?

I wasn’t covering the team in 2017 when they hosted a regional and lost in three games in the super regional to eventual champion Florida, but everybody I’ve talked to says the energy was great then.

And they say it pales in comparison to what Wake Forest has going now.

The sellouts for Friday night and Sunday night in the regional were great but it’s really the game in between, against Maryland, that shows how geared up the fanbase is. There was a 4 hour, 45-minute weather delay that pushed the start back to 10:45 p.m. and I thought it was the most-decisive homecourt or homefield advantage I’ve seen for a Wake Forest game. It was electric and you could feel Lowder (who faced one batter over the minimum in six innings before running out of fuel) and the team feeding off of the crowd.

Unless there are crazy delays this weekend, I don’t see *that* being repeated. But it’s bound to be a crazier atmosphere than the Friday and Sunday crowds.

For Alabama fans traveling to Winston-Salem this week, what are some go-to local spots to check out?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t first mention Putter’s. It’s down the street from the stadium and a staple of the Wake Forest community (so it might be packed, be warned). It’s a bar and grille with pub-type food, but also restaurant-style with a fairly diverse menu.

Otherwise, there’s Elizabeth’s Pizza and Jimmy The Greek in the shopping center across the street from Putter’s, both casual dining spots.

Options that don’t include eating and also are open during games … Old Salem is a neat spot near downtown, it’s an old-timey village. There’s a Dave & Buster’s at Hanes Mall. The microbrew scene is great; I’m a fan of Foothills but Fiddlin Fish and Incendiary are strong options.

I’m sure I’m missing some things but I would encourage Tide fans to roam around when they can, Winston-Salem is a decent place.