Ron DeSantis hails Shohei Ohtani’s 50-50 milestone

Gov. Ron DeSantis is a baseball guy at heart, and he paid homage to $700 million slugger Shohei Ohtani scoring one of the greatest achievements in the game at the expense of an in-state team.

“He is the first player in major league history to have 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season,” he said in Bradenton at the FDOT Manatee Operations Center.

DeSantis offered a historical rundown of the significance of the milestone, recorded during a 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I remember when they did 30-30, that was a big deal however many decades ago. I was like, oh my gosh, 30-30,” DeSantis recounted.

“And then the question was could you ever have someone do 40 to 40. And it was like, you don’t know if you could do it. And I remember a couple of guys did it and it was like a huge, huge deal. But I don’t think in those days it was even under consideration that someone would possibly be able to do 50 to 50.”

Though Ohtani played for the visiting squad, DeSantis noted that “it did happen in the state of Florida, and that will be a game that goes down in baseball history.”

DeSantis, who played baseball through college, has weighed in on baseball history before, contending that pitchers from previous eras had more zip on their heaters than the young bucks do today.

During a November event in Grimes, Iowa, he said Iowa native Bob Feller and fellow fireballer Nolan Ryan threw harder than modern pitchers, arguing “radar guns are juiced compared to what they were in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.”

“They said if you actually put somebody on the same plane, none of the pitchers now threw as hard as Bob Feller did back in his era or Nolan Ryan too,” DeSantis said, citing an unnamed documentary he had seen.