To me, almost any time is the right time for a baseball game. So an open night in the Bay Area on a recent business trip became the perfect time for a trip to the stadium. The San Francisco Giants weren't home; but the Oakland A's would be playing at home against the Detroit Tigers.

Like any self-respecting computer geek would do, I started by logging onto the A's Web site at MLB.com so I could find out more about the stadium, check out ticket prices and get the feel for availability. Then I went to StubHub and RazorGator to see if I could find some deals on good seats. There were deals galore on the seats not quite as good as I wanted (close to the field near the base paths), but in my sections of choice, once you add in the fees, they were barely bargains. So I decided to buy directly from the team Web site.

Since the A's use Tickets.com to issue their tickets online, there weren't many surprises. After all, many venues use Tickets.com as their online ticketing agent. Yet, as I went through the process, I realized online ticketing hasn't improved much in the past few years, and still has a way to go. It's not that the experience was bad; it's just not optimal.

A few years ago, while purchasing Pittsburgh Pirate tickets, I found that I couldn't choose tickets from a particular side of the park. If I wanted a specific seat type, it gave me what it considers the best available. I could keep trading in the seats before finalizing the purchase, and it would keep giving me alternate seats in the same section. For this season's A's-Tigers tickets, it still picked the section for me, pushing me toward third base every time, ignoring that I might prefer to be on the first-base side. Additionally, since I was buying six tickets, I was hoping for those tickets to be three seats in two consecutive rows, all together -- like the traditional baseball box. But that was not an option. I had to purchase 6 seats in a single row, seating us in a way that hinders communications between us.

There also were a few idiosyncrasies of the purchase, such as being timed out because I took too much time on a page. (This happens to me all the time when I purchase tickets.) It also couldn't take the account that I had created a few years ago when I went to a game in Anaheim (Angels versus Red Sox). Curiously, instead of giving me the option to reset my password, the instructions were to create a new account if you forget your password. This opens up a Pandora's box in which you might have many accounts, each housing your credit card information, thereby increasing your risk of credit card theft.

The worse part of the process, though, is the printed ticket. It's easy to do; no gripe there. But the PDF output includes the last four digits of the credit card with which you paid for the tickets. This is outrageously customer unfriendly. I don't want any portion of my credit card on a printed ticket that may end up in someone else's hands.

The Pirates, though, recently improved their online ticketing practices -- but only for a limited time. They removed the fees to entice fans into the park after trading away several fan-favorite players. That's the way all tickets should be offered -- where the price they quote is the price you pay. Don't hold your breath.