Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

The remark plays on Ruth’s cultivated public persona: the instinctive, physical genius who trusts his body more than book learning. By framing reading as a threat to eyesight—and therefore to home-run hitting—he reduces intellectual activity to a practical cost-benefit calculation tied to athletic performance. Whether sincere or performative, the line reflects a period when sports celebrity was often packaged with folksy anti-intellectual humor, reinforcing an image of the ballplayer as a man of action rather than letters. It also underscores how central vision is to batting, using that truth to justify a deliberately exaggerated conclusion: abandoning reading altogether.