Joe Lacob talks to reporters during a media availability after the Golden State Warriors practiced before the NBA Finals get underway later in the week at Chase Center in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, May 30, 2022.

A hard year for Oakland Athletics fans just got even worse.

Not only do the A’s have the worst team in the majors, the worst attendance in the majors, the worst owner in the majors, and enormous uncertainty about their future.

Now they have to hear how very different it all could be.

In a column by The Chronicle’s John Shea that published earlier this week, Golden State Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob detailed his unsuccessful effort to buy the A’s 17 years ago. The interview was part of Shea’s research for “Long Schott,” a book he wrote with former A’s owner Steve Schott.

Back in 2005, Lacob thought he had a deal to buy the A’s from Schott for $180 million. He and Schott said a verbal agreement had been reached and Lacob was just waiting for a call from the commissioner’s office.

But the call never came. Lacob’s calls to Major League Baseball never went through. And a few days later it became clear that then-commissioner Bud Selig had decided to sell the team to his fraternity brother Lew Wolff, and Wolff’s partner John Fisher.

Instead of Lacob, the team went to the invisible Fisher (who bought Wolff’s share in 2016). Fisher is the absolute opposite of Lacob as an owner in almost every way. He never speaks. He never inspires. He never spends. He never gets anything done.

Lacob, who told Shea that his experience with MLB informed his process in buying the Warriors, gets plenty done. He methodically went about getting to know people in the NBA, becoming a minority partner in Boston, so he would be a serious player and not considered an outsider. He bought the Warriors in 2010.

The result? His team has won four championships in the past eight years. He built Chase Center, without using public money. He has hired the best and the brightest. He has turned the Warriors into a model franchise. The team that he bought for $450 million is now valued at $5.6 billion.

The A’s? Ugh. Seventeen years after buying the team, billionaire Fisher continues to spin his wheels. He keeps tearing down the team, over and over. For years, he pocketed revenue sharing from other clubs. He still doesn’t have a ballpark. He’s proposed a bloated and complicated development project to solve his ballpark issues and wants $350 million in public infrastructure dollars.

Oh, and don’t expect him to ever stand in front of the public or his fans or the media and answer any questions. Don’t ever expect him to be accountable or responsible.

To make it all even more painful, Lacob says he would still like to buy the A’s from Fisher, whom he still considers a friend (clearly, Fisher opts not emulate his friends).

“I’ve had a standing offer to buy the A’s from John Fisher for I don’t even know how long. Over a decade,” Lacob told Shea. “It’s up to him; it’s his business. It would have been smarter to sell to me a long time ago because we would have been partners, and he would have been able to own a part of the Warriors as well.”

Well, no one has ever accused Fisher of being a visionary.

Interestingly, Lacob said that he suggested the Howard Terminal site to Fisher over one of their lunches. But, also interesting to those of us who remain vastly skeptical of the proposed $12 billion development, Lacob now thinks there are options.

Thanks to Lacob’s decision to build a new arena in San Francisco and the Raiders exit for Las Vegas, Fisher now has the entire Coliseum site to himself.

Here’s what a savvy sports owner thinks these days:

“If you couldn’t do Howard Terminal for some reason, I do believe for the first time in many years maybe it could be done at the Coliseum site,” Lacob told Shea back in October. “Because you’re the only sports team in town. … And build a ballpark village all around the site and create a destination. … Probably if I owned the A’s, I would take a fresh look.”

Probably, if Lacob owned the A’s, it would be done by now.

Schott also thinks the Coliseum is the right place for the A’s. In his book, he says the Coliseum is “logical” and “makes obvious sense.”

“I always thought if the A’s were going to stay in the East Bay, the perfect place to build a ballpark and prosper for the long term in Oakland was the Coliseum parking lot,” Schott wrote with Shea.

It should be noted that Schott made his money as a developer in the Bay Area. Not by inheriting his wealth from his family.

Schott describes the plans to try to wedge the development into the working port as “absolutely crazy. … I wouldn’t be fooling around with that.”

The silver lining in Shea’s gloomy column is that Fisher could still do the A’s a tremendous favor. He could sell the team to Lacob, pocket his millions — just as he likes to — and leave the team’s future to a man who knows how to get things done.

Well, it’s a nice daydream anyway. A respite from the A’s bleak reality.

Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: akillion@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annkillion

Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin County, Ann Killion has covered Bay Area sports for more than a quarter of a century. An award-winning columnist and a veteran of 11 Olympics, several World Cups and the Tour de France, Ann joined The Chronicle in 2012. Ann has worked for the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated. She is a New York Times best-selling author, having co-written "Solo: A Memoir of Hope" with soccer star Hope Solo,"Throw Like A Girl" with softball player Jennie Finch and two middle-grade books on soccer, "Champions of Women's Soccer" and "Champions of Men's Soccer." She was named California Sportswriter of the Year in 2014, 2017 and 2018. She has two children and lives in Mill Valley.