The Wellsville-Middletown baseball team came into this season with a new look.

The Tigers got brand new pinstriped and charcoal gray uniforms for the 2026 season. Last year, they wore black tops and white pants.

“I liked the charcoal gray because no one really has it,” W-M coach Alex Thull said. “The letters really pop on it. I thought they looked great. The boys picked them out, so we’re excited about them. We like them.”

Hopefully, the new look will help the Tigers turn in good results this spring. They picked up their first win of the season on April 8, cruising to an 11-1 win over the Marion County Mustangs at home. The game ended with two outs in the bottom of the sixth inning due to the 10-run rule.

“It always feels good to win,” W-M junior Gage Nichols said. “We’re starting to put it together.”
The Tigers lost their first six games before knocking off Marion County. A year ago, they fell to the Philadelphia school 11-10 in eight innings.

“I wanted to win this really bad,” Nichols said. “Last year, it was intense. It was a great game, but this year, we were out for blood and we wanted to get redemption.”

The Tigers didn’t celebrate another win on April 9 as they lost 15-0 to the North Callaway Thunderbirds on the road.

Thull said in order to be successful, his team must have the confidence to win more games. The Tigers’ last winning season was in 2021, when they finished 11-10 and captured a district title. They were 9-9 in 2023, which was Thull’s first season as head coach.

“The biggest thing for them is knowing they can win,” Thull said. “We would do a really good job earlier in the game. As the mistakes start to compile, we usually start to freeze up and play a lot more nervously. They need to realize that baseball is a long game. One mistake can’t snowball into two, three or four. They have to stay calm.”

W-M returned 10 players from last year’s team that won just two games. The Tigers also have five freshmen on their roster.

“We’re definitely a young team,” Nichols said. “I would say more than half of the team is underclassmen, so we definitely have a bright future.”

Isaac Todd and Logan Davis make up the Tigers’ senior class. Todd turned in a strong effort against Marion County, getting two hits with a double and an RBI.

“Isaac has been a really good leader for us as a senior,” Thull said. “He’s willing to step up and coach the younger kids because he’s the only one left from that (2023) team that was really good when CJ (Curd), Dylan (Alsop) and Mason (Guzy) were all there. So he’s working really hard to build something for those guys and getting the young guys reps and working with them. I couldn’t have asked for a better senior than Isaac Todd right now.”

W-M also had solid performances from its junior class in Nichols, Shane Joles, Willard Shireman and Nathan Mitchell against the Mustangs. Joles had two hits, including a two-run single in the bottom of the fourth inning that broke a 1-1 tie. Shireman had two hits with a triple and Nichols and Mitchell each had a hit.

“They’re ready to win,” Thull said. “They’re hungry, they worked their butts off. This is a team that has done a lot of not winning in every sport they’ve done. They’re so close and I tell them that all of the time. It’s getting that mindset shift and knowing how to win those close games.”

Freshman Andrew Maskey was the winning pitcher. He finished with nine strikeouts. He was relieved by freshman Colton Schofield with two outs in the top of the sixth.

“Andrew Maskey is doing a really nice job on the mound,” Thull said. “We’ve been kind of playing with him early to keep him from throwing a lot of pitches because I felt like he’s still super young and I don’t want his arm to be worn out, so he’s throwing one day a week and we’re trying to keep him under 60 pitches a game.”
The 11 runs against Marion County marked a season-high for the Tigers. They scored a run in the first, two in the fourth, one in the fifth and seven in the sixth.

W-M scored 24 runs in its first seven games of the season. A year ago, the Tigers had 13 runs in its first seven contests.

“This is a better hitting team than we’ve been the last few years,” Thull said. “We’ll return everybody but our two seniors next year, so the guys kind of realized that this is a two-year rebuilding project that we’re going through.”