Max Scherzer is meticulous, the sort of person who sees baseball as a game of centimeters, because inches are too big. Every so often, in the middle of a long season, Scherzer will pore over video of his last start, pause it mid-delivery and vow to change things. A centimeter can mean that much.

His right arm is his gift and his treasure, and if ever he notices his elbow above his shoulder line – even a hint of the dreaded Inverted W, which is correlated with though not scientifically proven to cause arm injuries – he corrects it. Little gets past Scherzer.

"You've seen in history guys blow out that way," he told Yahoo Sports last September. "I've never been a guy who does it, but every now and again, it'll creep higher than that plane, and I'm very cognizant of it."

Every little detail matters to Scherzer, the reigning American League Cy Young winner – every pitch a series of cues he must hit, every season an anthology of his accomplishments, every word rich with meaning. Which made Sunday's tack by the Detroit Tigers all the more curious. Of all the people at whom to lob a cluster bomb of loaded verbiage, they chose the person likeliest to parse the text and try to assign meaning to it.

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And there was meaning, all right, because something like this – it just doesn't happen in baseball. Contract negotiations falter all the time. The ones between Scherzer and the Tigers did just that. Protocol says both sides fall back on a trope – they weren't able to come to an agreement, or they couldn't find common ground, or some such niceties – and move along no matter how deep the animus.

Whatever happened during the discussions struck a nerve with Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski, who lit up Twitter with a statement that talked of the Tigers' "substantial" offer that would have made Scherzer one of the "highest paid pitchers" except "the offer was rejected" despite the "organization's intent to extend" Scherzer, which "would have accomplished that." Masters courses in passive-aggressiveness will add the Tigers' statement to their current curriculum.

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Now, Dombrowski's disappointment is understandable on the surface, seeing as his maligned maneuvering this offseason ostensibly was to free up money to re-sign Scherzer, and that FoxSports.com's reported offer of six years and $144 million would make Scherzer among the highest-paid pitchers in baseball – not to mention the second oldest of those with $127 million-plus deals. He's 29 now, turns 30 in July and only rotation-mate Justin Verlander (30) got his $100 million-plus more wizened.

When he signed, Zack Greinke was almost a year from his 30th birthday, Johan Santana just shy of his 29th. CC Sabathia and Cole Hamels were 28, Matt Cain 27, Clayton Kershaw and Felix Hernandez 26, and Masahiro Tanaka 25. Enormous pitching contracts that encompass lots of years and feature a high average annual value are the domain of young men, and Scherzer's age plays against him. Of course, he and agent Scott Boras can argue his wear and tear pales compared to those peers and thus positions him in the proper place to seek more.

When Kershaw signed his seven-year, $215 million deal, he did so with 18,643 regular-season pitches thrown. That's on the low side. Hernandez got seven years despite 24,872 pitches, Verlander seven with 25,424, Sabathia seven after 26,252. Scherzer's total after six major league seasons: 17,316.

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