The John Harper column I weighed in on yesterday is making its way around the Internet, and now everyone’s getting on board the Mike Pelfrey-is-a-headcase train.

Good lord.

OK, Mike Pelfrey does some weird things. He got the yips one night, he fell down while pitching on another, and one time, after a rough start, he blew off some steam by running laps of Coors Field.

Whatever.

The issue of whether Mike Pelfrey actually regressed in any significant way was addressed during the season by both Howard Megdal and Sam Page. I won’t go into any great detail, but read those pieces.

Basically, as a ground-ball pitcher Pelfrey relies on his defense. In 2008, he pitched in front of a decent defense. In 2009, he pitched in front of a terrible one.

Or, he succumbed to his obvious mental weakness.

Truth is, something did appear to go wrong for Pelfrey in the last month of the 2009 season. In his first 24 starts of the year, he allowed nine home runs in 140 2/3 innings. In his last seven, he allowed nine home runs in 43 2/3 innings.

Maybe his arm was tired, or maybe he made some sort of adjustment that didn’t work out so well, or maybe he really did get a touch anxious.

In any case, if the Mets can improve the defense behind Pelfrey, I wouldn’t bet on it continuing. Again, and for like the millionth time, professional athletes are professional athletes because they can triumph over mental hiccups.

Repeat after me: You do not make the Major Leagues if you are mentally weak.

You don’t.

Certainly, there are guys who’ve gone crazy, guys who’ve needed help, and guys who couldn’t be helped. There’s a mental aspect of the game, for sure.

But let’s not all pile on Pelfrey for a few on-field idiosyncrasies and an unlucky season. Remember that his weird mouth/tongue thing was just a lovable little quirk after 2008. Even up until midway through this season, everyone was certain John Maine was the second biggest headcase in the Mets’ rotation, not Pelfrey.

Check it out — I even joked about it in this column, which touched on a lot of the same topics as the blog post you’re reading now:

I’m confident that I know enough about baseball to analyze most of what the players do on the field. I’m not confident that I know enough about people to analyze what happens in their heads. Who am I to say that John Maine is a head case and Mike Pelfrey is not? Who is anybody? For all I know, Maine is just a guy who beats himself up after a bad day and Pelfrey is quietly a madman.

Look: Mike Pelfrey is the least of the Mets’ problems. He’s a 26-year-old pitcher who has managed to stay mostly healthy for two full Major League seasons. That alone is a valuable commodity, and combined with his 50 percent career groundball rate, makes Pelfrey a good bet to remain a solid part of a big-league rotation for the next several years.

Let’s not run him out of town for perceived mental weakness.

According to David Lennon at Newsday, the inevitable has come to pass: The Mets have offered Bengie Molina a two-year, $12 million contract.

If Molina signs, the Opening Day age of the average Mets’ offseason acquisition so far will hold steady at about 35 years old. That figure includes Alex Cora, Chris Coste, Henry Blanco and Mike Hessman, but not Elmer Dessens, whose deal isn’t official yet.

Look: I realize that doesn’t mean much. It’s still very early in the offseason, and the Mets will almost certainly bring in a couple of guys to drag that average down.

What’s troublesome about it, though, is that all those guys were offered deals before the Dec. 12 deadline for teams to non-tender arbitration-eligible players in this, a year in which the economy is expected to make more young, role-playing free agents available than ever before.

So while I recognize that the players the Mets have signed and pursued so far are mostly role players, I wonder why they were so eager to lock down so many old role players. Do they really value experience so highly that it’s worth the greater injury risk, greater chance of an erosion of skills, and the much, much smaller chance of a breakout performance?

Maybe. Who am I to say how the Mets should value experience? Clearly there’s some reason they felt Cora was worth $2 million and a vesting option, and it’s not something I can identify on any of these spreadsheets.

Early in my tenure writing for SNY.tv, I was accused by several posters on that site’s message boards of ageism. I complained so much about Omar Minaya’s apparent campaign to reunite the 1991 AL All-Star Team in Port St. Lucie in 2007 that people became certain I had some sort of agenda against older players.

I really don’t, though. I recognize that older players can offer value to a team, beyond just their experience. Players who were good in their mid-30s are likely to remain at least useful in their late 30s, and so, if the price is right, teams that appear on the verge of contention can and should turn to veterans for help.

For a team in the Mets’ current situation, though, I’m less certain it’s a good idea.

It can reasonably be argued that these Mets have uncertainty — due either to injury or recent performance — at every single position. Even David Wright showed chinks in his armor for the first time in his career in 2009.

That’s not to say the Mets should scrap everything and rebuild in 2010. They’ve still got a slew of great players, and so, with decent team health and a few key acquisitions, they should be competitive.

But with so many question marks, the Mets would be foolish to go all-in on 2010. They must reinforce their current crop of players with guys who might actually help the team beyond the upcoming season.

Bengie Molina is not one of those guys. Not many 35-year-old catchers are. And with the Rays appearing primed to part with Kelly Shoppach (whom they just acquired for a player to be named later) or non-tender Dioner Navarro, it’s easy to wonder why the Mets are instead ready to commit two years to someone with so many more behind him.

According to Joel Sherman’s Twitter, the Mets will meet with Ben Sheets’ agent at some point during the Winter Meetings.

Good.

Sheets could be a great pickup for the Mets. He’s always a huge injury risk — he’s coming off flexor tendon surgery and hasn’t pitched since 2008, plus was injury prone before that — but he’s also always good.

I have no idea what Sheets is looking for in a contract, and it sounds like no one does. He’s certain to have a ton of suitors, but likely the team that lands him will be one that offers him some intriguing combination of guaranteed cash and performance incentives.

The Mets probably should be that team. If he’s healthy, Sheets will better than everyone in the Mets’ rotation besides Johan Santana.

For what it’s worth, in 2004, Andy Pettitte endured the same surgery that made Sheets miss all of last year. Since 2005, Pettitte has average 210 innings a season.

Of course, Pettitte was a lot healthier than Sheets before he had the surgery, so it’s not a fair comparison. I only mean to say that it’s reasonable to expect Sheets to return to full health, or at least as close to full health as he can ever be.

Plus, Sheets represents a reasonable opportunity for the Mets to leverage the perception of their home park to their advantage. If, as has been reported, sluggers are shying away from Citi Field because of its dimensions, shouldn’t pitchers be more eager to sign on with the Mets?

And then wouldn’t it make sense for Sheets, who will likely be pitching for his next contract in 2010, to throw half of his games in Queens?

Again, it’s all about the cost. If some team is willing to give him two guaranteed years and $20 million, the Mets should bow out gracefully. If Sheets is presented with a slew of similar, incentive-laden one-year contracts, though, the Mets should do their best to make sure theirs is the most favorable.

John Maine’s name has come up in trade rumors today. Chris M made a good point in the comments section earlier on how Maine appears to be regressing since 2007, and it’s true: Maine has posted higher ERAs and lower strikeout rates in each season since his best one.

But, as a Mets fan, I’m prone to hoping Maine can bounce back and finding reasons for optimism: He did, after all, pitch well in a very small sample after returning from injury in 2009.

Moreover, I root for Maine because, from everything I read about him and the few times I’ve spoken to him, he seems like a pretty funny guy, or at the very least an interesting one. Two examples:

1) In February, 2008, John Maine told Marty Noble he had never visited the Internet.

I can’t imagine how this could possibly be true. Maine was born in 1981, like me, and would have been in my class in school. That means he went to college — UNC-Charlotte, specifically — from 1999 until he left for the Orioles farm system in 2002. That was the peak of the supposed dot-com boom, not to mention the peak of the Napster era.

Maybe Maine somehow missed all of that, in which case, he’s certainly fascinating. More likely, Maine made some sort of sarcastic comment in the clubhouse that was taken seriously, then decided to run with it to mess with a reporter.

And that’s awesome. I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I were a professional athlete I would make stuff up to mess with reporters all the time.

2) In September 2008, when the Mets were toying with the idea of bringing Maine back from injury and into a bullpen role, he told reporters he had already selected his closer music: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway.”

That’s cool for a variety of reasons. For one, players rarely go on record discussing their choice of intro music, and when they do, it’s usually something like, “Aw, shucks, that’s just what my teammates thought would be fun” or something lame.

Maine thought about it enough to confidently select his own, meaning he’s clearly aware enough to recognize how awesome closer music can be. As someone with a whole lot to say on the subject, I hugely appreciate that Maine cared enough to consider his song, even if it was just in passing, and even if he’ll never really be a closer.

In both parts of my aforelinked closer-music epic, I wrote, “hip-hop is woefully underrepresented in closer music.” Apparently John Maine recognizes this too, and so picked Sir Mix-A-Lot (you know, the “I like big butts” guy).

It’s not a bad choice, either. It’s funny because, though Mix-A-Lot is referring to the Broadway in his native seattle, it conjures images of John Maine and an entourage rolling down Broadway in Manhattan. And Maine’s posse almost certainly includes Mike Pelfrey, and Pelfrey just seems like a hilarious person to be part of a posse.

Here’s the song: