How Long to Read Key to a Cold City

How Long Does it Take to Read Key to a Cold City?

It takes the average reader 5 hours and 54 minutes to read Key to a Cold City by John R. Harris

Assuming a reading speed of 250 words per minute. Learn more

Description

Any devout baseball enthusiast will appreciate the creative metrics that Dr. Harris has applied to the careers of young black ballplayers whose big-league life (in the cases examined here) began a good six or eight years after Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The "study group" is mostly drawn from Post Cereal cards that Harris lovingly collected as a boy. Some of his collection's most promising members had dropped off the map when he revisited the cards decades later, and he grew curious. Black players, especially, seemed abundant in this unhappy set of strange disappearances. The project started, therefore, in a thesis: as of about 1960, making it in the Major Leagues remained much harder for African-Americans than for Caucasians.Statistical review included not only a comparison of black and white batting averages, Earned Run Averages, and other standard metrics, but also an exploration of environmental conditions, such as how often players endured the disruption of being traded and how much time they spent in inactivity between starts. There are two sides to every story, of course, and Harris takes pains to underscore the presumptions and blind spots in his own arguments; but the tendency for black players to encounter more obstacles and fewer rewards often emerges rather powerfully.As Dr. Harris attempts to refine these findings with additional research into sportswriters' accounts and other sources, he unveils a theory never succinctly proposed by any source: that the prejudices in question were not simply a conditioned reflex to skin color, but that the "anything goes" baseball of the Negro Leagues made coaches and managers of the Fifties' systematized, highly controlled Major League game very suspicious and uncomfortable. Members of the Caucasian "brain trust" feared being shown up or drawn beyond the bounds of their expertise. This stylistic prejudice-which lay close to the heart of the game's racial prejudice, Harris believes-appears nowhere more clearly than in the emphasis of the home run. Aaron, Mays, Robinson, Banks... they all rose to glory on an impressive wave of homering; but potential superstars like Pinson, Altman, Al Smith, and Floyd Robinson may have been ruinously infected by Home Run Fever.Such a conclusion, because it removes prejudice from the purely ideological corner of racism and chooses to view it as a complex puzzle-because, that is, it doesn't confront us with a simplistic "good guy/bad guy" scenario-will disappoint many of today's social critics who want to cast all racial questions in a "good vs. evil" mold. Dr. Harris stresses, however, that he is uninterested in being the "white scholar trying to advertise... moral enlightenment" in a grand feat of virtue-signaling. Referring to prejudices that beset his own son's baseball experience-not racial, but nevertheless severe-he asserts instead, "I am a father who once felt the anguish of looking on helplessly as his son's confidence was sabotaged-and who has re-aggravated that anguish in pondering the young lives of a few talented men now gone from this world."The book thus ends up being a personal odyssey: an odd, even unique evolution for a work on sports history. But then, baseball is a unique game. It bonds fathers and sons, and it breaks down barriers that ordinarily separate our communities. If John Harris's approach defies the expectations of sportswriting by confusing its subjects with our sons and our brothers, does it not also therein suggest the only possible solution to the problem of racial bigotry?

How long is Key to a Cold City?

Key to a Cold City by John R. Harris is 352 pages long, and a total of 88,704 words.

This makes it 119% the length of the average book. It also has 108% more words than the average book.

How Long Does it Take to Read Key to a Cold City Aloud?

The average oral reading speed is 183 words per minute. This means it takes 8 hours and 4 minutes to read Key to a Cold City aloud.

What Reading Level is Key to a Cold City?

Key to a Cold City is suitable for students ages 12 and up.

Note that there may be other factors that effect this rating besides length that are not factored in on this page. This may include things like complex language or sensitive topics not suitable for students of certain ages.

When deciding what to show young students always use your best judgement and consult a professional.

Where Can I Buy Key to a Cold City?

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