As useless pitchers go, Jeff Weaver isn’t really all that useless. Two years ago, he pitched credibly for the world champion St. Louis Cardinals; last year, after losing his first six starts, he ran up a 3.38 earned run average in his next 14, which included two complete game shutouts. He has the same loutish mound disposition that Yankees fans deplored during his brief run with the team, he throws the same slop he’s been throwing for years, and he leaves his sinkers too high in the strike zone. Still, most teams carry at least one starter over whom Weaver would represent a real improvement.

This being so, it isn’t surprising that the Milwaukee Brewers, contenders with a mildly sketchy rotation, yesterday agreed to contract terms with Weaver. It is, though, surprising that he was available at all. Not long ago, a pitcher like Weaver would have pulled down a sure $25 million as a free agent. Now he’s reduced to signing a minor league deal in April, with the weak concession that he’ll be able to declare free agency if he isn’t called to the majors by June. What’s more, he’s hardly alone.

One of the more interesting stories of baseball’s winter, one that stretched into spring training and has now dragged into the season, was the relative reluctance of teams to commit to several quite famous players. The most notorious case is that of home run king Barry Bonds, who remains unsigned despite still being one of the best hitters in the sport, but Weaver, until his agreement with the Brewers, was part of a reasonably large class of useful and well-known veterans, the sort who can usually find a job based on nothing more than name recognition. David Wells, Mike Piazza, Reggie Sanders, and Kenny Lofton are the most potentially useful of this group and are just the last remnants of a group that once included perfectly competent pitchers such as Livan Hernandez, who only signed in February, and Kyle Lohse, who signed in March.

Another aspect of this story was the large number of well-known veterans, including Kris Benson, Russell Branyan, Marcus Giles, Doug Mientkiewicz, Trot Nixon, Corey Patterson, Shannon Stewart, and Mike Sweeney, who signed minor league deals this winter. Some of these players are barely qualified for the major leagues at this point; some are actually fairly good. What they all have in common is that none could convince any team in baseball, no matter how badly run, to guarantee them anything more than a chance to earn a job.

The significance of the Weaver signing is that it shows this is no fluke. With Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez down, the Mets could really use a durable starter; St. Louis has jumped out to an early lead in a weak division and could be expected to be looking for bulk innings; some teams, such as the Washington Nationals, just don’t have any starters at all. (Lousy veteran Odalis Perez, who started last night against the Mets and counts as their nominal ace, signed a minor league deal over the winter.) Still, judging by the terms of his contract, no one showed any real interest in guaranteeing Weaver so much as a spot in their rotation at the league minimum salary. How can this be so?

As discussed before in this space, there are two possible explanations. The first is collusion, which is illegal and has been practiced several times in recent decades. It isn’t to be ruled out, especially in Bonds’s case, but there’s no credible evidence that teams are conspiring against bum players. The more likely explanation is that baseball this winter reached a tipping point in the understanding of replacement level.

This is no complicated idea. The claim, which is self-evident, is simply that there are plenty of fringe minor league veterans and second-rate prospects capable of doing as good a job as someone like Sweeney. In practice, though, teams have usually been reluctant to act as if they understand it, on the sound theory that one is less likely to be criticized for signing a veteran pitcher like Lohse to an inflated contract than for giving a dubious young pitcher like Mike Pelfrey a job, no matter what their relative merits as players.

Around the majors, though, we can see real evidence that on a league-wide basis, teams are starting to put this idea into practice: Players like Nixon, who are no better than random minor leaguers, are being paid exactly like random minor leaguers. If anything, teams are understating the value of some veterans; Weaver and Lofton may not be terribly impressive, after all, but they could help a lot of decent teams, and players like Branyan and Patterson are actively useful.

If this is bad news for ballplayers hoping to cash in on their reputations, it’s great news for fans. As fewer replacement-level veterans are signed to expensive contracts, fewer of them will be penciled into lineups because of their salaries. This will mean more competition for jobs, more opportunity for young players, and thus a higher general level of play. Concretely, it means you’re that much less likely to suffer though another season of Mientkiewicz at first base at Yankee Stadium, or Benson on the mound at Citi Field. Who could ever be against that?

tmarchman@nysun.com