The Nationals yesterday sold 40,000 individual tickets for the first season at their new ballpark, four times the number of seats sold on the first day of single-game ticket sales last season. All 4,000 of the available tickets for Opening Night sold out in less than 10 minutes.

We've heard reports that buying tickets online yesterday was a somewhat frustrating experience for some fans. Some spent a considerable amount of time in a "virtual waiting room," then were kicked back into the room after it appeared they were going to be given an opportunity to buy.

Team and company officials said everything worked the way it was supposed to, but it's hard to tell when tickets go that quickly. It would seem to me that if someone were permitted to select seats, they should have been given the opportunity to actually buy them, as long as they completed the transaction within a few minutes. (Most online sellers will release the seats if you don't enter in your credit card info within about 5-7 minutes.)

Whether it worked or not yesterday, the online system for buying tickets to a high-demand event like Opening Night strikes me as terribly inelegant and chaotic. You have thousands of fans flocking to a Web site at a specific time, many of them operating several computers at once and hitting refresh over and over and over again. They're chatting with buddies who are doing the same thing: "Did you get in? Did you get tickets? What, they don't have four together? OK, go with two! Just hurry!" Now, it beats have people camping outside a stadium to get in line or waiting in a phone queue. But there has to be an easier way.

I would suggest some sort of lottery system, similar to what many teams do for playoff games. Fans can simply enter a drawing and find a week later if they are eligible for tickets. Then they have maybe an eight-hour window to make a purchase or a spot opens up for another person on the lottery list. There's no crush of fans going to the same Web site, no long lines and less risk that a technical snafu will shut out fans from getting tickets.