The St. Louis Cardinals held a press conference, but with the Albert Pujols contract negotiation window finally ending this morning his agent, Dan Lozano, offered USA Today a terse statement.
Lozano describes the contract negotiations as having ended due to “today’s self-imposed deadline”, and goes on to mention that this doesn’t mean Pujols won’t be a Cardinal in 2012—you’d hate to alienate a bidder—"but simply delays negotiations until the conclusion of the Cardinals’ season." Here’s hoping that that five-days-after-the-World-Series window is negotiated while Pujols is still a little hung over from the victory champagne.
He talks also about a “difference of opinion” in understanding Albert Pujols’s true value to a baseball team. I don’t think it’s a difference of opinion—a lot, maybe even a whole lot—so much as a difference in degree, but until we have a solid source on the various leaked versions of the Cardinals’ contract offer it’s impossible to say just how far apart the two sides were.
The Cardinals, for their part, weren’t about to divulge that information, for all Joe Strauss’s in-conference suggestions that being specific didn’t really mean they had to be specific…