Another spring, another chance to buy baseball tickets for my hometown team. And another chance to be underwhelmed by the team's Web capabilities.

At 10 last Saturday morning, the Pittsburgh Pirates made tickets available to fans -- and I, like many other baseball enthusiasts, decided to get my Opening Day tickets quickly. A few minutes before 10, I jumped on my computer, connected to pirates.com, and got into the virtual waiting room -- that's Tickets.com's way of telling you that other people are in line before you.

Promptly on the hour, the waiting room opened up, allowing me to select my tickets -- sort of. I chose the number of seats I wanted, clicked on the type of seat, and told the Web application to continue. Very quickly, it told me that it had allocated my seats on the right field side of the ball park. But I wanted seats on the left field side -- and I certainly didn't want them as far back as the seats the Web site tried to assign me.

So I clicked on the link to look for new seats, thinking it might give me the option of choosing the other side of the field. Wrong. It brought me back to the beginning of the process. So I tried again, and was allocated seats in the same section -- a row behind my original request.

Recognizing I wouldn't get the option I wanted, I hopped on the phone to call for tickets. But even though I dialed a half-dozen times, I was not able to get through. Apparently the fans were out in force, and the system couldn't handle the crush. All I got was a message saying the line was out of service. Back to the Web.

Unfortunately, the three minutes I had to purchase the tickets had expired. So I had to start over. Again, the system allocated me seats in the same section -- and again I ended up with seats a row farther back than the previous try. At this point, the choice was between hoping to purchase the tickets I wanted by phone later, or taking the less-desirable tickets. I chose the latter.

But I had to go through the process two more times. The first time it gave me an error calculating the price of my tickets. The second time, the form to enter my payment information didn't complete.

If I weren't a real fan, I would have given up well before this point. But I finally was able to complete my transaction. Unfortunately, after the extra time and multiple reallocations of tickets, I ended up with tickets in Row U -- and still in a section on the opposite side of the field from where I wanted to sit.

Last year, I applauded the Pirates for making progress on their Web site, especially on the changes to their Web fee policy. This year, I can't say that I've seen much progress, although I'm always open for new things that come along.

This year's first interaction with pirates.com was frustrating and fan-unfriendly. I'll probably end up using it again, but you'd better believe that I'll think twice before using it to buy tickets. Perhaps the team should consider changing what it calls the fee it tacks onto tickets purchased online to an "inconvenience fee." Based on my recent experience, it would be more descriptive.