Baseball is, by its very nature, a fickle sport. There is a lot of variance in any one game and the old mantra that “anyone can beat anyone one time,” while true in any sport, is particularly true in baseball where the likelihood of the worse team winning is quite high in one game.
With this in mind, a double-elimination tournament with your season on the line provides a daunting task for any team - even if you are the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, playing at home, as the best overall team in a four-team region. In order to maximize the Deacs’ ability to advance, manager Tom Walter will be faced with many tactical decisions about when to use pitchers, when to save arms for another day, and perhaps when to close up shop on a game and focus attention to not playing yourself out of the tournament in the future by investing too much in one game.