Caden Rose says Alabama, Wake Forest are ‘two best teams in the country’

Alabama and Wake Forest kicked off the Winston Salem Super Regional with one of the best baseball games of the college season. The Demon Deacons took Game 1 of the best-of-three series, 5-4, but Alabama’s Caden Rose thinks that’s just the way it goes when the two best teams in the country get together.

Rose was unequivocal in his assessment after the game. Wake Forest is unquestionably one of, if not the best team in college baseball this year, and earned the No. 1 seed to boot. But Rose says ignore the ranking when it comes to the Crimson Tide.

“This is the two best teams in the country going at it right now. I don’t care what they have us ranked, this is the best two teams in the country slugging it out,” Rose said.

When that’s the case, Rose said, the team that keeps a clean box score is more likely to win.

On Saturday, that wasn’t Alabama. While both teams each registered an error, but things like getting caught stealing would hurt the Tide — as would a controversial call.

“And whoever makes more mistakes, that’s usually the thing that loses. And we made one too many mistakes today. And that’s something that we’ve gotta flush and come back out tomorrow and play our best baseball,” Rose said.

Down a game in the best-of-three weekend, Alabama needs to win two-straight games to advance to the College World Series. Against Wake Forest, that’s a daunting task.

Rose’s teammate, Dominic Tamez, wanted to add on to his teammates answer and note the Crimson Tide is perfectly capable of coming back and taking two games in a row off of Wake Forest.

“We take this as another SEC series, for us. Wake Forest is obviously a fantastic team. They have great athletes on their team. And we just played like another SEC weekend. Because this team’s basically an SEC team to us,” Tamez said.

Game time announced for Game 2 between Alabama, Wake Forest

First pitch from David F. Couch Ballpark will take place at 12 p.m. ET (local time) but 11 a.m. CT for those watching in Tuscaloosa. That’s when Saturday’s game was originally planned to begin before a non-game-related emergency took place.

As for the television information, that has not been revealed. We do know one of the family of ESPN channels (including ESPN+) will be the eventual destination.