- March 30, 2025
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Cardinal Mooney sophomore Colton Hyde is in the midst of a breakout season with the Cougars baseball team, but he’s still going to carve out time to watch the Baltimore Orioles each night.
For Colton, it’s the best way to stay connected to his father, Brandon Hyde, who manages the Orioles.
The Hydes reside in Venice so that Colton and his 15-year-old sister, Addison, can stay close to their dad while he works at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota during spring training.
When the regular season begins March 27, however, that connection will be reliant on phone calls and text messages and the Major League Baseball app.
The grind of a 162-game MLB season makes it challenging for Brandon and Colton to keep in touch at times, but it’s also given them unforgettable memories together.
Brandon was a catcher for California State University Long Beach and then a minor-leaguer for the Chicago White Sox from 1997-2000.
Following his playing days, Brandon briefly coached with his alma mater before the Florida Marlins hired him as a minor-league manager in 2005, where he remained until 2011.
Colton received his introduction to baseball around that time, but the fun truly started when the Chicago Cubs promoted Brandon to first base coach under manager Joe Maddon for the 2015 season.
Despite being tied to a team that had to travel for 81 games each season, Brandon found ways to keep Colton close.
During spring training, that meant pulling Colton out of school to come to Mesa, Arizona with him. When the season started, that meant hanging out in the clubhouse and celebrating wins with the Cubs.
“After every win at Wrigley Field there would be a celebration and Colton would be in the middle of that every single time,” Brandon said. “The group would get together and Colton would be in the middle. That was ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17 so he was probably eight, nine and 10 years old. He was pretty much a part of the team at that point.”
Several of the Cubs’ star players were just getting started with their MLB careers. Brandon said players like Anthony Rizzo, Javy Baez, Kris Bryant and Jorge Soler saw Colton so much they couldn’t help but like him.
“All of the Cubs guys, I’m still friends with,” said Colton, who added that his relationship with Rizzo was the most memorable. “I was friends with (Rizzo) with the Cubs and I’d see him when he was with the Yankees and we’d talk every time we played them.”
Colton is about to enter his second season as a batboy for the Orioles, and he also travels aboard the team airplane for road trips.
Now that he’s in high school and working on his own baseball career, Colton isn’t able to spend as much time in MLB clubhouses, but still makes time to be in the dugout and the clubhouse for roughly 40 games a year.
In the meantime, he said he steps up as ‘the man of the house,’ which entails walking the family’s two dogs and taking the trash out.
The start of Colton’s high school baseball career wasn’t nearly as fun tagging along with MLB teams.
He said he ‘barely played’ on Cardinal Mooney’s junior varsity team last year as a freshman and experienced frustration.
It was just as hard for Brandon to watch from afar.
“It was frustrating for me, too,” Brandon said. “I know what kind of player he is, and what kind of player he's got a chance to be. I just want him to have an opportunity, because when I look at him, I see myself a lot and how I grew later, got stronger later, but had the right fundamentals and good coaching.”
This season has been a different story for Colton.
A recent growth spurt has given Colton a 6-foot-2, 165-pound frame that he’s used to add some velocity to his fastball, which he said is now up to 89 miles per hour. He pairs that speed with a change-up and a curveball.
“I wasn’t sure, but I thought I had a chance to be a starter,” Colton said of this season. “It’s been fun pitching in most of the games and doing well every time.”
Despite being surprised he made the varsity team after tryouts, Hyde has turned into the ace of a Cougars team that is 14-3 two-thirds of the way through its season.
He’s pitched a team-high 34⅓ innings — 20 innings more than any other Cougars pitcher — with a 1.22 ERA, 36 strikeouts and just three walks.
Cardinal Mooney is ranked as the No. 92 team in Florida and has a chance to play deep into the postseason as the top team in its district.
Colton said he hopes to win a state championship with the Cougars, and with the way he’s pitching, that could lead to scholarship offers to play at the next level.
At some point, there will come a day when Colton no longer has the time to hang out with his dad during the MLB season, but they’ve already made enough memories to last a lifetime.
“It's been hard for me a little bit that he hasn't been around as much,” Brandon said. “I love having him with me. It's been a fun father-son special time for us throughout the years, but I'm really enjoying watching this success he's having.”
