Milwaukee catcher Jason Kendall, whose bat is so weak he occasionally bats ninth, is hitting .500. Rick Ankiel, the St. Louis outfielder who was once a pitcher, is on pace to hit 81 home runs. The Baltimore Orioles, almost certainly the worst team in the American League, lead their division, the sport’s toughest. Such results are the appeal of the season’s early days. Order must and will assert itself. Meanwhile, we can enjoy the possibility that Washington’s Tim Redding might go the entire season without surrendering a run.

While early returns may mean little, though, they do mean something; the patterns that will dictate the season’s course are already developing. It’s nearly impossible to discern the signals among the noise, but one way to do so is to concentrate on what hasn’t happened.

The biggest story of the season’s first week was the quick fall of the vaunted Detroit Tigers, who had zero wins going into last night’s contest. They opened the season 0–5 and saw three great players — Miguel Cabrera, Curtis Granderson, and Gary Sheffield — all get hurt. The early hole actually is a big deal; having spotted their rivals five games, to meet a reasonable expectation of 91 wins Detroit will now have to play .580 ball over the rest of the season, a 94-win pace. That’s certainly possible, but it isn’t likely: The same injuries in the lineup and bullpen that contributed to the weak start will make it difficult for Detroit to immediately bring up their level of play.

Making their task more daunting is that they’ve already used up one of the few bum streaks a playoff team can afford. Last year, three playoff teams suffered no 0–5 streaks, two more suffered two, one suffered three, and two made October despite four. Those two — the Yankees and the Colorado Rockies — did so in highly improbable fashion, against long odds. Detroit has hardly played itself out of contention, but to say that it’s early yet doesn’t wash.

Just as Detroit’s fast stumble brought their pennant chances into an early focus, so have fast starts by two ace pitchers made the National League Cy Young race quickly interesting.

The first is the Mets’ Johan Santana. Last year, for the first time in his major league career, he showed a flaw, allowing 33 home runs, which was almost 50% more than he’d ever surrendered in a season. After yesterday’s brilliant start, he’s now pitched two games and given up just one long shot. This isn’t inherently meaningful, but it’s the best possible sign for his near future; his changeup has been thunking off the edges of bats, he’s hung just one breaking ball, and his pitches, when hitters connect with them, have been falling out of the air in the outfield like freshly shot quail. If last year gave some small reason to think his pitches were becoming everso-slightly more flat than they had been, one can now cautiously say that looks like it may not be so.

The second is Chicago Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, who hasn’t gone wild. In his first two starts last year, Zambrano walked seven; the year before, nine; the year before that, six. This year, he’s walked one. The only thing keeping Zambrano from joining the ranks of the game’s absolute elite over the last few years has been his erratic control. It’s easy to draw a line to his focus from his control issues, and to his notorious volatility from his focus, which has tended to flare up more earlier in the season. (During his career he’s walked 4.3 per nine in the first half, and 3.9 in the second, which isn’t a small difference.) As in Santana’s case, two starts are two starts, but the prospect of a newly matured, or at least calmed, Zambrano should be a frightening one for the National League.

More consequential than any of this, though, and the greatest example of how what doesn’t happen can affect a season, is the refusal of all 30 teams to sign anyone from a long list of veteran free agents that includes future Hall of Famers Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza and questionable but potentially useful pitchers David Wells and Jeff Weaver. As David Cameron of USSMariner.com shrewdly noted, this, and the minor league deals handed out to such veterans as Corey Patterson, is compelling evidence that baseball hit a tipping point in the understanding of the concept of the replacement level this winter. The practice, long derided in this space as elsewhere, of signing old free agents to expensive contracts even though they’re often no better than random minor league players, appears, for the first time in the free agency era, to be nearing an end. We’ll see over the next few weeks whether this is really so, or whether it’s a mirage; but I suspect it’s more likely that Kendall will hit .500 than it is that pitchers like Weaver will much longer be able to count on securing four-year deals no matter how badly they pitch.

tmarchman@nysun.com