I kind of figured Bengie Molina and the Mets had agreed on something by now and were just holding off on announcing it, but according to Buster Olney, Bengie Molina rejected the team’s latest offer.

So if you’re a pessimist, you think this makes the Mets more likely to up the amount of dollars or years in their offer to Molina. If you’re an optimist, you think this makes the Mets more likely to sign someone else or use some combination of the catchers they already have.

Unless, of course, you’re hoping the Mets sign Molina, in which case, reverse all that.

But only a small fraction of Mets fans appear to think the Mets could actually benefit from adding Molina, and, of those, few seem particularly excited about the possibility.

My favorite argument for signing Molina was summed up well recently in a FoxSports.com blog entry:

Beltran’s unavailability for Opening Day places a greater emphasis on adding a player who can hit in the middle of the order. And Molina batted cleanup for the Giants through most of the 2009 season.

While it’s true that Molina hit cleanup for the Giants in 2009, it’s also true that the Giants had the worst offense in the Major Leagues last year. Signing Bengie Molina to hit in the middle of your order just because he hit in the middle of the 2009 Giants’ order is like signing Luis Ayala to be your closer because he finished out games for the 2008 Mets.

Anyway, until Molina signs elsewhere, the Mets sign a different catcher, or someone on the team comes out and confirms that some combination of Henry Blanco, Chris Coste, Josh Thole and Omir Santos will start behind the plate in 2010, we can only assume that the world’s slowest game of chicken is still underway and that all that happened today was Molina announcing his intention not to flinch.

While stumbling around the Mets’ blogosphere this weekend, I came upon a poll that I, disappointingly, cannot now find for linking. It asked what users thought was the low point of the 2009 season for the Mets.

The leaders were the obvious choices: Luis Castillo’s dropped pop-up, Jose Reyes’ injury, Mike Pelfrey’s yips, Fernando Martinez’s faceplant and the like.

My answer wasn’t provided as an option.

I suspect not many people were watching the Mets on the afternoon of Aug. 5. For one, I realize not many people work in settings where they are encouraged to watch baseball games from their desks.

Plus, by early August, half the roster was on the disabled list, the other half was playing uninspiring ball and the Tony Bernazard saga was still shrinking in the rear-view mirror.

But I was excited to tune in that day because the Mets were starting Jon Niese, who seemed, at that point, the team’s lone remaining person of interest.

Fernando Martinez, the team’s other near-ready prospect, was already done for the year after hamstring surgery. So Niese, who had posted impressive peripherals in Triple-A, represented the only promising new Met, the one guy who could cull meaning out of the lost season’s final months and prove he belonged in the big leagues.

No one thinks Niese will be a Major League ace anytime soon — or anytime at all, really — but I knew then that if he pitched well for the Mets down the stretch, they could go into Spring Training 2010 with a decent and inexpensive young starter for the middle of their rotation. He was the very last glimmer of hope that something good could come out of an awful, awful year.

Then, an inning and two-thirds later, he did a full split while covering first base on a groundout and appeared to tweak something.

Then, one warmup pitch later, he was on the ground, writhing in pain.

That was it for me: rock bottom. That’s when I stopped thinking “terrible luck” and “a series of unfortunate events” and started thinking “inarguable hex” and “black magic.” The Mets weren’t even going to have a chance to assess their best young players, because their best young players couldn’t escape whatever strange, vengeful Phillies-fan deity had already wreaked havoc on their established stars.

Niese was expected, at the time, to be fully recovered from his injury by the upcoming Spring Training. So here’s hoping that happens.

But we would know so much more about Niese and what he could be expected to contribute tot he 2010 Mets if it hadn’t happened, obviously, and for me, it was the lowest point in a year full of them.