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    Chris Donnelly

    Author & Baseball Historian

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    About Chris

    Chris Donnelly is an author and baseball historian, whose work has largely, though not exclusively, focused on New York City baseball in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He has written professionally for over 15 years and is the author of five books on baseball, including Get Your Tokens Ready: The Late 1990s Road to the Subway Series; Road to Nowhere: The Early 1990s Collapse and Rebuild of New York City Baseball; Doc, Donnie, the Kid, and Billy Brawl: How the 1985 Mets and Yankees Fought for New York’s Baseball Soul; How The Yankees Explain New York; and Baseball's Greatest Series: Yankees, Mariners, and the 1995 Matchup That Changed History.

    Chris has appeared at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, as well as on the Michael Kay Show and the Seattle Mariners 710 AM pregame show. A graduate of The College of New Jersey, he currently resides in Mercer County, New Jersey with his wife, Jamie, and their two children.

  • Books by Chris Donnelly

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    Starting with the first ever regular season matchup between the Mets and Yankees and ending with the last out of the 2000 Subway Series, Get Your Tokens Ready provides the most in-depth look ever published of both teams during the late 1990s and the 2000 season.

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    Road to Nowhere is the story of New York City baseball from 1990 to 1996, describing in intimate detail the collapse of both the Mets and the Yankees in the early nineties, the Yankees’ then reclaiming of the city and the Mets attempts to rebuild from the ashes.

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    Doc, Donnie, the Kid, and Billy Brawl focuses on the 1985 New York baseball season, a season like no other since the Mets came to town in 1962. Never before had both the Yankees and the Mets been in contention for the playoffs so late in the same season. For months New York fans dreamed of the first Subway Series in nearly thirty years, and the Mets and the Yankees vied for their hearts.

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    An examination of the unique parallels between New York City’s evolution and that of the New York Yankees, How the Yankees Explain New York illustrates how the storied history of the Bronx Bombers mirrors that of the Big Apple itself.

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    Baseball's Greatest Series details what many believe to be the most exciting postseason series in baseball history: the 1995 Division Series between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners.

  • Reviews

    Praise for Chris Donnelly’s Get Your Tokens Ready: The Late 1990s Road to the Subway Series

    “Many of us of a certain age believed we’d never see a Subway Series as our fathers and grandfathers had, and then, amazingly, we did. In the final piece of Chris Donnelly’s lyrical trilogy detailing New York’s late-century baseball renaissance, he brings us back to those wonderful years when the dream became, first, possible and, ultimately, real. In his hands Get Your Tokens Ready is a masterful story told by a master storyteller.”— Mike Vaccaro, sports columnist for the New York Post and author of 1941—The Greatest Year in Sports

    “When George Steinbrenner, sports talk radio, and the back pages were king, baseball was at its best. Chris Donnelly masterfully transports us back to one of the wildest rides in the sport’s history, when the Mets and Yankees shaped a generation of fans at the center of the baseball universe.”— Evan Drellich, senior writer for The Athletic and author of Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess

    Praise for Chris Donnelly’s Road to Nowhere: The Early 1990s Collapse and Rebuild of New York City Baseball

    Named a Best Baseball Book of 2023 by Sports Collectors Digest
    “If you’re a Yankees or Mets fan, there’s a lot here for you.” — Andy McCue, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture
    “Road to Nowhere is an excellent history of New York City baseball in theearly 1990s. With its thorough use of primary and secondary sources, itshould be of interest to baseball history scholars and baseball fans alike.” — Anastasia L. Pratt, Journal of Popular Culture
    “The battle for New York has always been a rich part of the city’s baseball tap-estry, and there was a time it seemed the Mets would own its soul forever. InChris Donnelly’s meticulously reported and wonderfully written book Roadto Nowhere we learn just how the Yankees regained their swagger—and, justas important, their sway over the best baseball town of all.” — Mike Vaccaro, New York Post columnist andauthor of 1941—The Greatest Year in Sports
    “What a gift Chris Donnelly has given to baseball fans in New York and allthose who live and die with the Mets and Yankees. Road to Nowhere is aninsider’s look, chock-full of entertaining anecdotes and revealing details based on extensive research, at the period in the early and midnineties when the Big Apple became a Yankees town once again. Colorful, legendary characters abound in a delicious tale of baseball in Queens and the Bronx.” — Andrew Maraniss, author of SingledOut: The True Story of Glenn Burke
    “Chris Donnelly is an utmost authority on New York baseball during the1990s. In Road to Nowhere he has written the definitive book tying in theend of a mostly glorious 1980s decade. . . . It is a beautifully written book with plenty of fresh content from those who played on these two New York teams. A must-read for any baseball fan interested in that period.” — Erik Sherman, author of Two Sides of Glory:The 1986 Boston Red Sox in Their Own Words

    Praise for Chris Donnelly’s Doc, Donnie, the Kid, and Billy Brawl: How the 1985 Mets and Yankees Fought for New York’s Baseball Soul

    “A rollicking look back at the pre–Wild Card era.”— Patrick J. Sauer, New York Intelligencer
    “Chris Donnelly captures the essence of how entranced both fan baseswere, as their respective teams battled at the top of their divisions, as theyplayed meaningful baseball in both Yankee and Shea Stadium through September.” — Jerry Milani, Sports Media Report
    “Donnelly’s latest is a must-read for sports fans everywhere. His atten-tion to detail along with the firsthand accounts of so many players andpersonalities involved brought me back to the summer of ’85 and that unforgettable baseball season.” — David A. Paterson, former governor of New York
    “Although many readers already know the outcome of the 1985 season, Donnelly does a good job of building suspense. A solid choice for bothMets and Yankees fans.” — Kirkus Reviews
    “The author has done a thorough job exploring the intense rivalrybetween the talent-rich ’85 Mets and the equally loaded Yankees forsupremacy in the city during what were the generally bleak days of themid-eighties. . . . [An] entertaining trip down memory lane.” — Mark Levine, Booklist
    “Fun. Nostalgic. Contagious. Doc, Donnie, the Kid, and Billy Brawl is amanual for Yankees and Mets fans to read cover to cover, and to use asammunition for just who was a better team in 1985, and why.” — Observer-Dispatch (Utica)
    “A really fun look back at the summer of 1985 when the Mets and theYankees flirted for the very first time with giving us a Subway Series. Finework by Chris Donnelly.” — Mike Vaccaro, New York Post

  • Contact Chris

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