Were the SF Giants the team who gave Yoshinobu Yamamoto a javelin?

But in case the sting of those moves was starting to wear off a bit after Christmas, Wednesday gave Giants fans some fresh wounds to lick, courtesy of Yamamoto’s agent Joel Wolfe.

“He thought that San Francisco really reminded him of Osaka and thought it was a beautiful city,” Wolfe told reporters in Los Angeles of Yamamoto, the former star of the Osaka, Japan-based Orix Buffaloes.

“If the Dodgers had not been pursuing him, there was a good chance San Francisco could have been his destination,” Wolfe added.

Wolfe also said that one of the clubs courting Yamamoto presented him with a “team-issued javelin” as a gift, one of several he was reportedly given. On the surface, it’s a delightfully weird move. But Yamamoto has used a toy javelin in a warmup routine before, so this mystery team surely was hoping for the gift to be a sign of their depth of interest in Yamamoto.

Could the Giants have been this mystery javelin gift-giving team? It’s hard to say yes with any certainty, but they do have a strong javelin connection in their history: Former Giants manager Felipe Alou was a renowned javelin thrower in the Dominican Republic before he signed with the Giants in 1955. Alou is still a part of the organization as a special assistant to baseball operations… if you’re willing to galaxy-brain things, you can make it work.

But gift or not, it sure seems like the Giants never truly had a shot at Yamamoto, the right-hander who has drawn comparisons to Tim Lincecum. On Wednesday, Yamamoto said the Dodgers signing Ohtani was not the top reason he signed with Los Angeles. 

“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,” Yamamoto said through his interpreter on Wednesday. “Winning now and winning into the future was probably the most important thing in making this decision.”

The Athletic’s Giants beat reporter Andrew Baggarly had made it clear just how strongly the Giants and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi were pursuing Yamamoto. “There’s no numbing the pain if they fall short in the Yamamoto pursuit,” Baggarly wrote on Dec. 20. “According to those familiar with Zaidi’s thinking, he has never been so all-in on a free agent in his six years while leading the Giants’ baseball operations group.”

The excuses could be plentiful as to why the Giants keep falling short in their pursuits of the top free agents: the ballpark, the city of San Francisco itself, their ownership. Zaidi hasn’t spoken to the media since Yamamoto’s decision became public Friday, so it’s unclear where the Giants’ final offer ended up compared to the 12-year, $325 million deal Yamamoto signed with the Dodgers (who will also pay a posting fee of more than $50 million to his former team). 

But truly, no matter how heigh the Giants’ interest was, they aren’t competing with their eternal rivals right now on the field — and that’s leading to them losing in these big moves off the field, too.