For any San Francisco Giants fan who has Dodgers fans in the family, it must not have been a fun holiday weekend. Not after the Giants aggressively chased the top two free agents this winter, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani, who both arrived in Los Angeles this month with their bitter rivals.
Joel Wolfe, the agent for Yamamoto, handed Giants fans some new wounds to suck on Wednesday, just in case the pain of recent trades was beginning to fade a little after Christmas.
During Yamamoto’s debut press conference with the Dodgers, Wolfe revealed to the press how near the Giants were to signing his client.
Yamamoto was a former star of the Orix Buffaloes in Osaka, Japan. “He thought that San Francisco really reminded him of Osaka and thought it was a beautiful city,” Wolfe told reporters in Los Angeles.
“There was a good chance San Francisco could have been his destination if the Dodgers had not been pursuing him,” Wolfe continued.
In addition, Wolfe claimed that one of the teams wooing Yamamoto gave him a “team-issued javelin” as a gift, one of many that he was supposedly given. It seems like a delightfully strange move at first. However, Yamamoto has previously utilized a toy javelin in a warm-up ritual, so this secret team undoubtedly hoped that Yamamoto would take note of the gift as a symbol of their genuine admiration.
Was this mysterious javelin gift-giving team the Giants? They do have a significant historical relationship to javelin, however it’s difficult to determine for sure: Before joining the Giants in 1955, Felipe Alou, the former manager of the team, was a well-known javelin thrower in the Dominican Republic. Alou continues to work for the company as a special assistant to the baseball operations department. It’s doable if you’re willing to apply your galaxy-brain.
Nevertheless, whether Yamamoto is a gift or not, it appears the Giants never really had a chance against the right-hander who has been compared to Tim Lincecum. Yamamoto stated on Wednesday that Ohtani’s signing with the Dodgers was not the main factor in his decision to join Los Angeles.
Through an interpreter on Wednesday, Yamamoto remarked, “I wouldn’t say [Ohtani] was the sole reason in deciding to come here, and if he went somewhere else, I probably would have still ended up in LA.” “The most crucial factor in this decision was definitely the desire to win both now and in the future.”
The intensity with which the Giants and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi were pursuing Yamamoto was evident, as reported by Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic, who covers the Giants beat. On December 20, Baggarly wrote, “There’s no numbing the pain if they fall short in the Yamamoto pursuit.” “Those acquainted with Zaidi’s mindset claim that in his six years as head of the Giants’ baseball operations division, he has never been so all-in on a free agent.”
There are many reasons why the Giants are unable to sign the top free players, including issues with the stadium, San Francisco as a whole, and their ownership. It’s unknown where the Giants’ final offer ended up in comparison to the 12-year, $325 million contract Yamamoto inked with the Dodgers (who will also pay a posting fee of more than $50 million to his old team). Zaidi hasn’t talked to the media since Yamamoto’s decision became public on Friday.
However, despite their intense interest, the Giants aren’t currently competing with their enduring rivals on the field, which is causing them to lose these significant decisions off the field as well.