Today is a big day of sorts. Free Agents must be offered arbitration by their current teams today if they are going to offer. This affects us regarding the three ranked FAs we have--Springer, Looper, and Izzy--and to a lesser extent, our unranked FAs--López, Izturis, and Villone--and the two FAs who are pretty much done with baseball (although one of them may not have realized it yet) but filed anyway--Encarnación and Mulder.
Players have until the 7th to accept arbitration (or not), and then in January the legal and financial aspects get worked out.
Whether these players will be offered arbitration, whether they will accept, and whether they will end up signing with the Cardinals anyway will not have too much effect on the team, as far as I can tell. Matthew Leach has a good break-down of the specifics over at MLB.com.
I can tell you that I hope we end up re-signing three of these players. It doesn't really matter to me if it's a result of arbitration offers or not. Hopefully there'll be some news soon.
