It was the coldest night in New York in decades. Temperatures had fallen to the single digits, and the streets were as empty as I’d ever seen them. But there I was, the intrepid journalist, braving the weather to get the story.

I felt intrepid at the time, at least. But after I got to the small bar on 35^th street and warmed up, the three block walk from the subway didn’t seem quite so daring.

I was there, fulfilling my journalistic integrity, chasing a story I thought the media was overlooking – or, at least, something that might become a story later. Mets fans were angry. Spurred on by an outspoken Marc Carig column in Newsday and unsatisfactory statements from the front office, a small group had decided that the situation had grown desperate. Talk wasn’t enough – it was time for action. So they’d organized a meeting. The email that had gone out announcing the meeting said the group already had 300 members.

The Mets owners, these marauding fans declared, weren’t spending enough. Payroll had plummeted, and the Mets had wasted a talented group of players by refusing to spend enough money to round the team out. The Mets had been to the playoffs two years in a row, in 2015 and 2016, but had lost more than 90 games in 2017, and then had gone into the offseason stagnant. They had as good as announced that they didn’t plan on improving. Through all the losses, they had implored their fans to wait just a little bit longer – and now the time had come, and it seemed the waiting had been for naught.

So Mets Twitter, famous for overreaction and anger, had acted. One fan, a blogger and podcaster, had started it. He changed his Twitter name to #MetsFansUnited, and started soliciting members. I signed up immediately, of course, because already, I could see that this could be the scoop of the century. A few weeks after the revolution began, an email went out to everyone who had signed up asking them to help schedule a meeting, and a few days after that, a date and location had been decided.

Naturally, when I caught wind of the meeting, I made plans to attend at once. Grand plans they were too, as well, full of hypothetical scenarios inspired by tropes from journalism movies. “I’m press,” I imagined saying to a confrontational attendee. “You want to kick me out? Go ahead! I’ll turn this whole town against you with the stroke of a pen!” I didn’t really think I’d be forcibly ejected, but even my realistic imagination conjured up a scene of journalistic fervor. I’d sit at the table scribbling notes, maybe tweeting once in a while to appease the public demand for insider knowledge of the top-secret meeting.

Then I arrived.

It was 6:45; the meeting was scheduled for 7:00, and no one had shown up yet. There were two levels to the restaurant, and a lobby between them; an upstairs that was presumably quieter and more reserved, and a lower level, low-ceilinged with a pool table and TVs on the walls. I waited at a table near the front; when the waitress came by, I asked if she knew where the meeting would be. I explained that a group of Mets fans had gotten angry about the team’s owners’ financial situation, and was gathering in her restaurant to start a revolution, and asked where the group would be seated. Even as it was striking me that the gathering bore a remarkable resemblance to the genesis of Communism, she told me that she had no idea.

***

I have been a Mets fan for my entire life, give or take, and I am fully aware that the Mets have often been embarrassingly bad. Not just bad records, but things that would never happen to any other team. So I understood the desire for a Mets populist movement. Sometimes, this team just feels like too much.

For instance: there was this time at the 2013 Winter Meetings. Every winter, Major League Baseball holds its meetings for a few days in early winter for team executives and player representatives. It’s quite common for a big contract or trade or two to come out of these meetings, so baseball reporters flock to them as well. And fans of all 30 teams wait with bated breath, hoping their team can land a superstar.

As the 2013 Winter Meetings began, Mets fans were desperate. The Mets had gone 74-88 in 2013, their fifth consecutive losing season since 2009. But there were whispers that something was going to happen, and Mets fans, as we tend to do, rapidly worked ourselves into states of thorough overexcitedness.

We needed a new shortstop. Our shortstops in 2013 were Omar Quintanilla, who batted .222, and Ruben Tejada, who batted .202. But rumors were coming from the Colorado Rockies that Troy Tulowitzki, the best shortstop on the planet, was available via trade. And early in the afternoon of November 13th, 2013, Jeff Wilpon, son of Mets owner Fred Wilpon and a sort of Donald Trump Jr. of Mets fandom, issued a statement to the press at the Winter Meetings. The Mets were very busy doing business, he said. They might have a big announcement later that afternoon.

Fans went hysterical. It was too good to believe. Was it Tulo? Could it possibly be? Who else could it be? Some of us tried to temper expectations, but deep down, we all believed that at the very least, this had to be something worth getting excited about.

And sure enough, later in the afternoon, the Mets released a statement on Twitter and made the big announcement public. It wasn’t Troy Tulowitzki. The big news was that Huey Lewis and the News had scheduled a concert at Citi Field.

The Huey Lewis saga feels like kind of thing that might, in slightly different circumstances, might have started a revolution that ended under the guillotine. So I could see why fans were upset. I was upset too. With the Mets these days, I’m upset far too often.

Yes: I understood the point of the meeting. I wanted the Mets to be better. We deserve better owners, owners willing to spend money to make money, or even better, owners who don’t care about making money as much as they want to put a good team on the field. We play in the New York media market, for goodness’ sake; we should be rolling in extra money to throw at all the players we want. For many reasons, most of them coming back to our ownership group, we don’t — or can’t. So we keep losing, and every once in a while catch lightning in a bottle and make a run to the playoffs, but the bottom line is that people have every right to be upset. I was somewhat upset myself. And deep down, I hoped that this revolution ended with the preferably nonviolent deposition of our owners, and the installation of people who loved the Mets just as much as I did.

But actually going ahead and starting a revolution? Really? I mean, I love baseball as much as the next guy, and probably more — but really?

***

The blogger, podcaster, and political operative who’d organized the meeting was the next one to arrive. He showed up a few minutes later, and around 7:15, when it started to sink in that the dozen or so guys who had shown up were the entirety of his movement, he called the group together. We sat around a table in the middle of the lower level, fifteen people or so crammed around a table meant for eight: no one ordered any food, and I couldn’t help wondering what the wait staff thought of us. A few people had beers; maybe they’d been warned in advance that they’d need help getting through the night. Then the leader called the meeting to order.

I mean that literally: he handed out a printed agenda, and explained that if the group was going to be successful, it would have to be orderly. “Has anyone ever worked with Roberts’ Rules of order?” he asked. He took the table’s stunned silence for assent.

Two things were clear from the start. The first was that the organizer was taking the meeting seriously – very seriously. He started off by explaining the group’s anonymity policy.

“Some of us, we can’t be seen doing this,” he said. “I know I, for example, can’t participate in this movement after today, except anonymously.” When the table went around doing introductions, he insisted that everyone call him “Nelson,” even though most of us already knew his real name. I didn’t know what he did for a living, and I didn’t ask; anyone who had a career that could be destroyed by being discovered being part of a baseball advocacy group wasn’t likely to reveal that career to an outsider.

Most of the introductions were different. “I’m Mike from Bayside on WFAN,” one short, goateed man said.

“You’re Mike from Bayside?” a younger man in a Mets jacket asked. “I’m Joe from Queens! You’re a legend, man!”

There were a few people I recognized: one relatively well-known figure on Mets Twitter, and one guy who worked at a Mets blog I’d written for. But otherwise, it was a group of unfamiliar faces, most goateed and some balding, with Mets caps above them.

The second thing that became clear, immediately after introductions ended, was that the group had big ideas – bigger, I thought, than a meeting of a dozen people warranted, but no one else seemed to notice. This tendency towards grandiosity, combined with an absolute inability to discuss only one topic at a time, meant that the conversation quickly veered from realistic tactics to improve the Mets situation to the realm of the fantastical.

At the beginning of the meeting, “Nelson” introduced two discussion categories: long-term and short-term goals. The only concrete goal I remember being proposed was increased recruiting. “I think we aim for 50,000 members,” the person who proposed it said. This was met with nods: the attitude around the table seemed to be that this was a realistic, sensible proposition that would be no trouble at all to accomplish. After that, the debate over long-term and short-term goals turned into a discussion of hypothetical ways to get kicked out of Citi Field during Mets games, and which of those would raise the most awareness for the cause. “We’ll wear bags over our heads!” “We’ll rip off our Mets jerseys and have shirts with dollar signs underneath!” “As they escort us out we’ll break into song!” The group finally came back to the agenda, but not before one attendee had regaled the table with stories about how he got free tickets to Mets games by pretending to have children.

The men assembled around the table weren’t professional organizers; that much was obvious. Several times, “Nelson” had to steer the group back to the agenda, and to reality. One of the early items on the agenda was deciding whether the group’s existence would be temporary or permanent, but debate on the issue quickly mutated into a discussion of what the group’s picket signs would say.

“Nelson” tried to bring the discussion back towards the agenda. “So, on the question of being a permanent organization,” he said, “I’d like to offer a motion that – hold on, do you guys know about offering motions?”

No one said anything.

“It means I’m making a proposal,” he said. “And it’s good we got to this early, because we’re going to be offering motions a lot.” Then he offered a motion to make the group a permanent supporter’s union.

“Some groups like this even have a seat at the table when ownership makes decisions!” he said. “To me, that’s what this movement should aspire to be.” I thought about mentioning that groups with a seat at the ownership table often had tens of thousands of members, while his group had twelve. But instead I said nothing.

After voting on basic questions about the group – like its existence – the first idea on the agenda was a publicized boycott. After a twenty-minute discussion on the semantic connotations of the word “boycott,” and whether it would help or hurt their cause to use it, the group decided to table the question until later. “Nelson” introduced an alternative proposal: group members would take money that they would ordinarily spend on Mets tickets and merchandise, and give it to charity instead. They would make signs that showed how much they would have spent and how much they’d given to charity, and they would hold these signs up outside Citi Field. This, ideally, would cause millions of fans to abandon the Mets until the owners started taking their team more seriously. On hearing this idea, the group was almost awestruck.

“I love it!” one guy shouted. The idea was so good that the group adopted it without any discussion or thought about actually making it work: they instantly turned to deciding which charity to give the money to, to send the greatest message.

“We’ll give it to a Queens little league!” an older man said.

“No,” someone responded, “the Yankees foundation!” He let loose a dastardly cackle, imagining the pain in the Mets’ owners’ souls when these twelve fans donated money to the Yankees foundation. This went on for some time, until “Nelson” put up his hand.

“Who wants to take charge on this?” he asked. No one said a word. It was around this time that “Nelson,” to me, started to look like he was having serious second thoughts about the group he had assembled.

No one seemed to have any knowledge of even basic communications strategy. Several times, after the discussion had devolved into rants about just how awful Mets ownership was, someone would ask “but how do we get this message out?” No one ever responded, at least not with anything at all likely to ever happen. I was a sports columnist for my college paper, and I’d just spent three months interning in a Congressional office. “Write an Op-Ed!” I wanted to shout. “Send it to the papers, they’ll spread your message far and wide!” But my journalistic integrity kept my silent. When I got home later that night, I wrote the Op-Ed myself, just to prove to myself how easy it could have been. 

The grandiosity of expectation continued when the group got into planning its first event: a protest outside the offices of Major League Baseball.

“I think to be effective, we’d need at least a hundred people,” said Mike from Bayside.

“I’d say a few hundred,” said the man next to him, in a tone that suggested that either of those numbers would be a cinch to accomplish. Having agreed to the requisite number, the group moved on to other business, without sparing a thought for the fact that maybe the dozen or so guys assembled around the table in this cold, dark bar in midtown were all the manpower their movement could count on.

***

I knew about ten minutes into the meeting that this group’s ambitions were astronomically higher than its resources could ever go. “Nelson” kept talking about turning the group into a supporter’s union in the style of British football unions, and sure enough, some British football supporters’ unions have accomplished the goals he wanted to work towards, but the groups that managed to do it had organization, and dedication, and more than twelve members. As soon as I left, I texted a friend, who I’d asked to come with me as my photographer and who had declined vigorously, that this meeting had been just about the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen. So I wasn’t surprised, a few weeks later, when I got an email containing the minutes of the group’s second meeting. It had been held in person and via conference-call, and apparently, the conference-call aspect had been wildly successful. In fact, the email said, conference calls worked so well that there was no need to meet in person at all.

On the one hand, they’d voted that a rally outside MLB headquarters would be ineffective. Were they moderating their goals to match their low resources and membership? It took me until the next set of bullet points to find out.

“Set goal to be able to set full page ad in NY Post, Newsday, or Daily News,” it said matter-of-factly. “Can decide later on which paper. Price of full page ad should cost around $25,000.” It didn’t mention who would be in charge of raising the money; as I remembered, the question of forming a fundraising committee had been tabled at the previous meeting after no one had volunteered to do it.

I scrolled through the email, smiling in disbelief as I saw ideas that alternated between mundane and impossible. There was “create a Facebook page,” and then the $25,000 ad, and then “create a board of directors,” and then “create March happy hour.” As I reached the end of the email, I realized that the group hadn’t even been able to reach a resolution on item two of the original agenda, which had been tabled at the first meeting after a long, fruitless discussion. The group still didn’t have a name.