It’s a short season — so short that Eric Wells rethinks the game.

To put it into context, the Marshwood baseball coach compares Maine’s high school season to the MLB or collegiate levels. In the majors, a quarter of the season is 40 games, while in college, it’s around a dozen. For his team, though? With just 16 regular season contests, that portion of the year represents just four games.

“It’s really hard for players to manage that mindset of, ‘I’ve got 16 games to do it,’” Wells said. “Now, that’s our job as coaches, and every coach probably takes a different approach with how they work with their players on that, but I think you find a lot of times where, if you have a bad week in high school baseball, your season, individually, is tanked.”

Maine high school baseball and softball teams face a short season that puts added weight on each pitch, each inning, each at-bat. In seasons that fly by, teams have to take different mental approaches in two sports where success is more accurately judged across larger sample sizes.

Among states with standardized maximum regular-season lengths, Maine is tied with Vermont for the shortest high school softball season in the country at 16 games. In baseball, only Montana (14) plays fewer regular season games than Maine and Vermont.

That might not sound like much, but the games come fast over a short timespan. The Gardiner softball team, for instance, began its regular season April 28 and played its finale on June 3. That’s 16 games in 37 days, including Sundays and days when previously scheduled games were rained out.

“It’s very hard (to condense the season to five weeks),” said Gardiner coach Ryan Gero. “You really have to worry about the durability of the kids — are they strong enough to play 16 games in a five- or six-week stretch? Then, you look at it mentally, physically and emotionally.”

Having a young team made this season difficult for Gardiner, whose 3-8 start represented roughly two-thirds of its regular-season schedule. On the other hand, when the Tigers did find momentum with a May 27 win over Morse, the shortened season worked to their advantage. They won three of four games — 25 percent of their season — in a 72-hour stretch, turning a rough start into a Class B South quarterfinal appearance.

But, playing a large chunk of the season in only a few days can be daunting.

“I think it is, but we love games; that’s why we play,” said Gardiner freshman pitcher Molly Takatsu. “When you win and get to play again the next day, that’s great, and you want to keep it going. … No matter what, you just have to go on to the next one.”

The St. Dominic Academy baseball team had a similar trajectory. The Saints had to replace a large portion of last year’s roster that won a third consecutive state title, and they went 2-6 over the first half of the season against a difficult schedule. Yet once St. Dom’s figured things out, it got rolling, and rides a 10-game winning streak into Tuesday’s Class D South final.

“We went into the season being young with only one senior, and just with how short the Maine baseball season is, you get a lot of things thrown at you,” said St. Dom’s coach Bob Blackman. “We just did what we could to focus a lot of our attention on practice and getting reps, and all of the sudden, it started to click and come together.”

Falmouth baseball coach Mike D’Andrea has seen the phenomenon more than ever this season in Class A South. With rain upending the early part of the Navigators’ season, his team played its 16 games in 36 days from April 29 to June 3 — an even tighter window than the Gardiner softball team.

The pitching in A South has only made that more daunting. Falmouth faced not only two Division I-bound aces in Scarborough’s Erik Swenson (UMaine) and Gorham’s Wyatt Nadeau (Vanderbilt), but also standouts Charlie Hudson of Marshwood, Brady Adams of Sanford and Wesley Turnbull of Noble.

“It was just a year for us where it seemed like we were seeing dude after dude after dude, and it’s like, ‘Man …’” D’Andrea said. “When you’re up against that, you have to come to play every game, and there’s only so many games for you to go out and do it. … You can get into a slump quickly and not come out.”

Skowhegan senior catcher Natalie Gilman knows full well what a few bad games can mean. A Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class A first-team selection last year, Gilman went through a rough stretch toward the end of the regular season before breaking out of it with a multi-hit game June 3 against Messalonskee.

“I was in a slump there for a little bit of time; when I hit the ball, it would just fall to people instead of getting caught,” said Gilman. “You don’t play a lot of games, so (a big game) after a run of going 0 for 4 or 0 for 3 raised my confidence going into the playoffs, definitely.”

Baseball pitchers have it even harder, said Wells, the Marshwood coach. Given the pitch-count restrictions the sport has in place, some top pitchers often get just five or six starts in the regular season. In that case, it sometimes takes just two or three rough outings for a pitcher’s season to get thrown off track.

Teams that go on smaller losing streaks over the course of multiple weeks can see frustrations build. Such was the case with Dirigo softball, which, after losing its first three games over a 13-day span, turned its season around and has won 13 of games heading into Tuesday’s Class C South final against Hall-Dale.

“With us, we literally had one game a week for those (first few), and it felt after that like we played our schedule in three weeks,” said Dirigo coach Scott Robbins. “I think we actually have a team that does better by playing, putting that one away and getting right back to it and playing again, versus playing and taking a day or two off before we play again. So once the games got rolling, we picked it up.”

The tight season means coaches must make adjustments quicker than they’d like, something Blackman has had to do at St. Dom’s over the years. Depth is key to any sport, but it’s especially key in the world of Maine high school baseball, where there’s only so much time to turn a struggling lineup, or a struggling portion of the lineup, into one that produces.

“You don’t have time to be patient, so with that 10th or 11th player, when that time comes, you say, ‘Hey, maybe it’s your turn,’” Blackman said. “That’s where you need to be able to motivate your players to be that guy who maybe wasn’t expected to be in that mix, but all of the sudden, he’s worked himself in and doesn’t want to let go of it.”