Juan Pierre, 29, is not particularly good, judged by the standards of major league center fielders, nor is he particularly bad. In a typical season, he’ll get on base about as often as an average player, steal about 60 bases, connect for about 30 extra-base hits, and play adequate, though unimpressive defense. He’ll play every single game (and thus lead the league in outs made), he won’t embarrass the team, and people like him — he has a Cajun accent, he hustles, and he looks like a Little Leaguer in his massive batting helmet. Per at-bat, he’s not any better than any number of fourth outfielders around baseball; his strength is that you can pencil him atop the lineup on Opening Day and never have to think about him again. A team could win the World Series with Juan Pierre as its centerfielder, or finish with the worst record in baseball, and neither result would be particularly surprising.

Gary Matthews Jr., 32, was, for years, one of those fourth outfielders who played pretty much like Juan Pierre without the durability. This decade, he’s played for the Cubs, Pirates, Mets, Orioles, Padres, and Rangers. They were all bad teams that could have used some outfield help, and before he got to Texas he didn’t show any of them enough to earn a crack at a full-time job. This year, coming off a season in which he hit .255 with a poor .320 onbase average, Matthews grabbed a fulltime job in centerfield and delivered, hitting .313 with a .371 on-base average, 69 extra-base hits, and decent defense.

If you’ve been following the off-season action this week, you know the punch line: Pierre signed with the Dodgers for $44 million over five years, and Matthews with the Angels for $55 million over five years. They’re stunning deals, probably more shocking in their way than the Red Sox’s seemingly insane $51 million bid for the rights to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka or the Cubs’ successful $136 million bid for Alfonso Soriano.

Those deals involve teams overpaying for what is ostensibly star talent, and while you can debate their wisdom, at least the idea that if you’re going to spend you’re best off spending on star players is sound. Pierre and Matthews aren’t stars, aren’t close, and aren’t likely, given their ages and histories of uninspiring play, to be even as good as they’ve been, yet they’ve earned deals comparable to the fouryear, $52 million contract Johnny Damon earned last off-season. These two aren’t even really that far off what perennial MVP candidates Vladimir Guerrero (five years, $70 million) and Miguel Tejada (five years, $60 million) are making.

The question is whether these are stupid deals or whether baseball’s salary structure is changing.(These possibilities are hardly mutually exclusive, of course.) The problem is that so few meaningful free agent signings are made that it’s always hard to tell. If the going price for a relatively old, averageish outfielder really is about $50 million — and whether or not that’s the going price, that’s what these players are signing for — there’s not much to criticize here. That edges up against the Pangloss fallacy, though, into the absurd tautology that what major league teams do is good because they’re major league teams. If every team, after all, goes out and signs some 40-year-old bum to a $200 million deal, you can’t then just say that 40-year-old bums cost $200 million these days and that’s that.

Probably, as with the Matsuzaka deal, it’s simply too early to pass judgment here. There are a lot of factors at play. We’re in the midst of a stretch of bad free agent classes, and players lucky enough to find themselves in such classes always get paid more than it seems they should. Player salaries appear to have been artificially held down by collusive behavior by the owners in 2002 and 2003 — the owners recently paid the union money to settle claims of collusion without admitting wrongdoing — so it’s hard to judge today’s deals against those signed a few years ago, especially considering that baseball salaries naturally rise faster than the rate of inflation. There’s also just a lot of money in baseball right now, between a revenue sharing agreement that’s worked better in practice than it does in theory, new-television money, and above all the ever-growing popularity of the game. Some of it is going to work its way toward guys like Juan Pierre.

On the merits, these were probably ill-advised deals, especially the Matthews signing — they’re hardly anything fans of either team should get truly worked up over, but a team that makes enough such moves eventually turns into the Orioles. In the bigger picture, though, it’s probably time for people to adjust the mental gauges by which they judge deals and realize that average players — if not these particular average players — are now worth eight figures a year, a fact that’s naturally going to make the likes of Soriano and Barry Zito very large sums of money. If Brian Cashman or Omar Minaya seem to abandon the relative restraint they’ve so far shown this off-season, realize that they may not be abandoning it quite so much as it may seem.

tmarchman@nysun.com