Tom Walter evaluates how Wake Forest continues to find comeback wins at College World Series

Wake Forest is one win away from being one step away from their ultimate goal. The No. 1 overall seeded Demon Deacons breezed through the regional and Super Regional rounds, advancing out of the first weekend with three wins by a combined score of 48-7, which sounds more like an Alabama football score against some Sun Belt team. That’s 16 runs per game to just over two given up; just crazy numbers.

Speaking of the Crimson Tide, they were next in the Wake Forest warpath. ‘Bama kept it close in Game 1 of the Super Regional, only losing 5-4, but the Deacons beat ’em like a drum in Game 2 by a 22-5 score to end the Tide’s feel-good run in the aftermath of their scandal from the end of the regular season.

Really, Wake’s run in the College World Series hasn’t been much different. They’re 2-0 and on the precipice of entering the championship series unscathed for the whole tournament. But don’t think that means this group isn’t battle-tested, because they spent most of their two CWS victories trailing before making late rallies to win both by a 3-2 score. Per head coach Tom Walter, the pitching is doing their job to keep Wake in the game.

“Well, first off, our pitching staff keeps us in it and throws up zeros. Again, we got down 2-0 early in both the games, and our staff just kept throwing up 0s after that and we kept making big pitches and kept making plays,” he said of the comebacks after the win over LSU.

Walter also thinks some luck was involved and the team was fortunate to work some walks to help plate some runs.

“We got helped out with some free passes in both of those games. We had two walks that led to the two runs against Stanford, other than the Brock (Wilken) homer, of course, and then today we had three walks. And they were good walks. They were walks that we earned.”

Lastly, Walter credited the LSU starting pitcher Ty Floyd for his solid start on a day where Wake Forest really struggled to score.

“So obviously Floyd was very good today. And he stoned us for five innings, and finally kind of that third time around we felt a little more comfortable.”

Luckily, the Wake offense was again helped by a tremendous performance from the pitching staff while mustering just enough runs to cruise to the pool play finals.