Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who served as the captain of the Yale University varsity baseball team in his college days, talked sports and how it has affected his life on The Daily Wire’s sports podcast Crain & Co., giving clues to how and why the governor — who has been lauded on the Right for his determined, rational governance — makes his executive decisions.
Host Jake Crain started things off by asking “How has athletics shaped you in your life up to this point? Are there still some things you go back to? Are there lessons that you’ve learned?”
DeSantis answered by remembering his childhood, when his Little League team reached the Little League World Series. At the start of the season, the team had written “WWT” underneath the bills of their caps, which stood for “We Want Taiwan,” then the dominant team in Little League competition.
“Taiwan was the machine in Little League baseball,” DeSantis recalled. “Now, it turns out that’s because they had 13 and 14-year-olds playing instead of 12-year-olds, but put aside that, that’s just kind of the nature of it; we didn’t know any better. So our goal was to get to Williamsport and we did. We didn’t win the entire thing, but I think that it showed me that if you set a goal and you work every day, that you can accomplish really big things.”
DeSantis, known for his adept political timing, gave a hint as to why after co-host David Cone queried, “Many consider the act of hitting a baseball to be the hardest to be the most difficult feat in sports. What was your philosophy and your mindset when you stepped into the batter’s box, and have those instinctual reps aided you in the political arena?”
“I think the times when I got out of whack at the plate were when I would get too quick and try to make a decision really quick right out of the pitcher’s hand; the times I would hit well I would really focus on watching the ball, trying to get as close to me as possible before I made the decision to swing,” DeSantis stated.
“Some of the times I had my best streaks I’d be hitting a lot of doubles to right-center, hitting balls to center, left-center, really that part of the field,” he continued, then spoke of swinging too early: “If I was hitting a lot of pitches down the third-base line or foul, fouling balls off, then that tells me I was probably a little too quick.”
Referring to a pitch that spins directly down as it approaches the plate, he said, “A typical 12-6 curveball, pretty easy to see right out of the pitcher’s hand, but when you start talking about these sliders or some of these changeups, the quicker decision you make, the more peril you’re gonna have if you guess wrong.”
DeSantis proudly spoke of how his four-year-old son refused to take the easy way out after the hosts showed a clip of his four-year-old son Mason swinging at golf balls with a truly fluid swing.
“Here’s what he does in golf,” DeSantis enthused. “I’ll hit the ball in the fairway, — well, usually I’ll drive the ball, hopefully it’s in the fairway — I’ll tee him up where my drive ended up; he hits his driver and I’ll hand him the iron, and he will hit the iron until he gets it on the green. Then he you hand him his putter; he will not take any ‘gimme’ putts. He has to putt it all the way in.”
DeSantis beamed as he noted that if someone tried to give his son a “gimme” putt, he would reject it outright.
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